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THE NATION: TRINAMOOL CONGRESS

Miss Adventure

Congress to NDA and back again. Is Mamata now trying to return to the NDA once more?

By Sumit Mitra

There is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous," Napoleon said while retreating from Moscow. His words remain a universal warning for men and women playing for high stakes. Such as Mamata Banerjee, supremo of the Trinamool Congress. Just five weeks before the West Bengal assembly elections, she ditched the BJP, her ally in two successive Lok Sabha elections, and embraced the Congress, on which she had once bestowed the epithet of "B-team" of the ruling Left Front.

Even before the counting of votes for the May assembly elections in West Bengal had begun, she was flashing the "V" sign before television cameras. She had even made plans to hold the swearing-in ceremony of her cabinet in the open air on Brigade Parade Ground.

Now, after winning only 60 seats in the 294-member Assembly, Mamata has made the first moves to return to the National Democratic Alliance, "on respectable terms". That's shorthand for her re-entry into the Union Cabinet. More importantly, it underlines an entreaty, if not a bargain clause, that the door to the A.B.Vajpayee Cabinet should be firmly shut on former minister of state for external affairs Ajit Panja, who had revolted against her on the eve of the elections over the issue of ditching the BJP and falling into the Congress trap.

Both requests smack of a poverty of judgement, coming, as it were, from a pampered NDA partner who had walked out of the alliance without having much of a reason. And now, with egg on her face at the hustings, she wants back all that she threw away.

Surprisingly, when she visited Delhi in May Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Home Minister L.K. Advani still seemed to have a soft corner for her. Vajpayee did not rake up the past in his 30-minute meeting with Mamata. Advani was somewhat official, having got Home Secretary Kamal Pandey on his side while listening to Mamata's tale of woe concerning allegations of poll rigging by the CPI(M). The emotional persuader that Mamata is, she did not miss the opportunity to call on the Home Minister's wife, Kamala, at their Pandara Park residence. Even former defence minister George Fernandes, whose scalp Mamata had demanded in the Tehelka aftermath (the irony is, Fernandes did resign from his post but Mamata left the NDA regardless), welcomed her to his house.

It is still not clear if she is not two-timing the BJP again. While in Delhi, she met Sonia Gandhi too though that visit did bring to the fore the differences within her party. Bikram Sarkar, MP from Panskura, refused to visit 10 Janpath in tow because, he is reported to have said, "I don't see any reason why we should meet the leader of what we heard to be the CPI(M)'s B-team." Panja suspects that it was yet another move by her to convince Sonia that the Trinamool MPs would be "at the service of the Congress if and when it comes to getting the numbers for toppling the NDA Government".

Much of the confusion within the party stems from the inexplicable ambiguity in Mamata's recent acts. It is not even clear if her party actually quit the NDA. On March 15, she made the party MPs sign a so-called resolution reposing "full faith and confidence" in the prime minister but stating towards the end, somewhat regretfully, that they were leaving the NDA. Interestingly, the resolution has not been delivered till now to any constitutional functionary-the President, the prime minister or the Lok Sabha Speaker. Her only tokens of "revolt" were her own resignation and that of Panja from the Union council of ministers.

However, the BJP leadership has, while adopting a let-bygones-be-bygones approach towards her, firmly told her that if she was indeed keen on returning to the NDA fold she must offer, before Parliament's monsoon session on July 23, a duly adopted party resolution of support to the alliance. She wants to use the annual "Shaheed Diwas" observed by the party on July 21 to commemorate the death of 13 supporters in police firing in 1997, for taking a final decision. That may well be too late, for the Lok Sabha takes at least 15 days to change the "division numbers," determining allocation of seats on either the treasury benches or with the Opposition.

Much of Mamata's current identity crisis is due to an inflated public perception of her political clout, which emanated from the hype she got from the Bengali media and from the sheer exasperation in Bengal with Jyoti Basu. But in November last year, when the CPI(M) replaced Basu with Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, a younger man who spoke the "new Labour" idiom of Tony Blair, Mamata lost her cause. On the rebound, she went to the Congress. Before cosying up to the Congress Mamata was an anti-left crusader. Today she's the leader of a small gang of seven MPs in the Lok Sabha whose allegiance she claims to steer.

Even this claim taxes credibility. Except Sudip Bandhopadhyay, a family friend of Mamata, none of the remaining MPs will play with the "B-team." And Panja is quietly working on a new enrolment drive for the party, for a change of leadership before July 21. If it happens, the Left-bashing Bonaparte of Bengal will be headed for quite a ridiculous ending.

MetroScape

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