With her victory over the BJP in the Assembly elections imparting to her the repute of being a leader with the gumption to take on Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his party, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee's visit to the national capital is being seen as symbolising her arrival on the national scene.
During her five-day visit to Delhi beginning Monday, Banerjee is scheduled to call on President Ram Nath Kovind and PM Modi. However, it is her other political engagements that are being viewed with great interest, given that after the West Bengal victory, the Trinamool supremo is keen on assuming a national role.
Just ahead of her visit, the West Bengal government constituted a two-member commission of inquiry headed by retired Supreme Court judge Justice Madan B. Lokur to probe the Pegasus snooping allegations. The move was aimed at sending across the message that the Mamata regime was capable of taking on the Modi dispensation at the Centre.
Banerjee has already declared that she is keen on making efforts to bring opposition parties together to take on the BJP as a united force in the Lok Sabha elections in 2024. Ahead of the visit, she was named leader of the Trinamool's parliamentary party, a move aimed at giving her a national designation and an official mooring in Delhi.
The chief minister is expected to host a meeting of opposition parties on July 28, and it will be interesting to see how she positions herself vis-a-vis the other players in the non-BJP bloc and how the other parties view her emergence as a leader to reckon with at the national stage. She is expected to have individual meetings with some prominent opposition leaders too, such as Congress President Sonia Gandhi and NCP supremo Sharad Pawar.
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The backdrop of Banerjee's Delhi sojourn includes meetings that election strategist Prashant Kishor, who is working with the Trinamool, has held with Pawar and the Gandhis, and there is speculation that it had to do with exploring the possibilities of stitching together an opposition alliance ahead of the Lok Sabha polls in 2024.
Banerjee's speech in Kolkata on the occasion of the annual Shahid Dibash of the Trinamool Congress set the stage for her Delhi visit. Speaking mostly in Hindi and English in an apparent move to reach out to an audience much wider than West Bengal, she said, “I don't know what will happen in 2024. But all the opposition parties need to start working together, and must start right now. Our freedom is in danger today. We have two-and-a-half years for the election. Every day matters now. We can't forge alliances just ahead of the elections. Democracy is in danger. We need to oust the BJP to save the country.”
While all eyes will be on Banerjee's much hyped visit to the capital and the kind of reception she gets from the other opposition parties, she is expected to use the tour to gauge for herself the possibilities of getting the non-BJP parties together and if she can be the pivot of such a formation.
