In 1992, Mamata Banerjee wanted to be Congress president of West Bengal. She failed. In 1998, she was desperate to run the election campaign of Congress in the state. But Sonia Gandhi, then Congress president, refused. So Mamata rebelled and was expelled from the party. She joined the Atal Behari Vajpayee-led NDA government and became an ally of the BJP. Today, Mamata is out to take down the Congress all over India.
Time will tell whether she will be successful in her endeavour or fail like before. But one thing is clear, that even if she has declared the BJP as a “politically proclaimed offender”, her war against the Congress has not ended.
Banerjee’s tactics to defeat the Congress are being played up as she aspires to form a formidable opposition in India to defeat BJP, replacing the Congress. She has been at it even though many of her own party leaders openly admit that the Congress has to be a major force as an ally to defeat the BJP.
But since Mamata won a massive mandate in the Bengal assembly elections, her guns have been trained on the Congress rather than the BJP. The Congress’s failure to oppose the BJP was a key mention in all her subsequent speeches.
She has begun by attacking the Congress in states where the party is in fragile condition. Tripura, Meghalaya, Goa and UP are her first batch of battlegrounds where she is out to fish out big Congress leaders.
The man behind her operation in the Northeast was Luzinho Felerio, the former in-charge of the Congress in all northeastern states. Felerio was successful in bringing a large number of Congress MLAs into TMC overnight. He was successful to some extent in Tripura and he is now eying the state of Mizoram.
Sources have told THE WEEK that talks are on between former chief minister and tallest Mizo Congress leader Lal Thanwala, who is considered very close to Felerio. But Felerio has told the leadership that it would be futile to sell the idea of the TMC in the state of Mizoram, who are alien to Mamata Banerjee's politics despite the Presbyterian church, unlike the Baptist Council in the rest of the northeast, being more anti-BJP than even Muslims in India.
But Mizoram is also fighting the issues of infiltration of Chakma who are ethnically related to Bengalis settled in Hilly areas of Bangladesh. It will be difficult for the Mizos to accept a Bengali dominated party in the state.
Banerjee faces a similar contradiction in Assam where the political, social and armed revolution lasted for years on the issues of original inhabitants and outsiders. The TMC would find it tough to set its foot firmly on the ground in Assam, particularly when the BJP chief minister is known to be a hardliner.
Banerjee is thus roping in Congress leaders in Maharashtra, Karnataka, UP and in the coming years, she will vouch for Madhya Pradesh. She is on good terms with Kamal Nath who had met her in Delhi a couple of months before.
Finding Sharad Pawar non-committal on ditching the Congress, Banerjee is also in talks with the Shiv Sena. Though Uddhav Thackeray avoided meeting her, his son gave Banerjee a courtesy call. States like Tamil Nadu and Kerala are not in her mind as of now, as leaders close to her said that in TN, Mamata has a friend and in Kerala, the Congress cannot be snuffed out due to Rahul’s involvement.
Mamata's entire map has been drafted by Prashant Kishore who has been working as an emissary to her. Banerjee will also try to get a foothold in Bihar and Odisha. While in Bihar, she would like to become a close ally of the RJD, in Odisha she would wait as Navin Patnaik looks indispensable.
Kishore’s charting out plan and the TMC’s attack against the Congress—without taking names of the Gandhi family—makes it evident that Banerjee is out to make Congress irrelevant.
Moreover, many senior Congress leaders in Lutyens Delhi are silent supporters of her. That is helping Kishore and Banerjee and apparently, as a senior Congress leader in Bengal said, it involves “backstabbing the Congress”. If she can succeed in obliterating the Congress from the heartland of India, obviously she would help make the Modi-Shah dream come true—of a Congress-mukt Bharat.
But a TMC leader has rejected the idea.
“We are not here to make the Congress disappear. But obviously, it is no harm in taking the place of the Congress in opposition. How many seats does it have in Lok Sabha? We will get more than them,” said a TMC MP.
But the Congress is not sitting idle. The party is gearing up to prevent the erosion in the hands of Mamata like it had in Bengal in the 1990s and 2000s.
Last month, Congress's National Herald noted that Amit Shah is planning to “tighten the noose around Mamata’s neck” by activating old cases. Through this article, the Congress wanted to convey that Banerjee is playing into the hands of the BJP.
Whether Mamata is playing into the BJP's plans or is out to fulfil her own dream will be known after the UP election.
