Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee may have tried to play it cool by extending “congratulations to all the winners in different States,” but senior leaders of her party Trinamool Congress are apprehensive of the impact that BJP’s astounding success in UP may produce in Bengal.
With the Trinamool Congress chief having almost burnt her bridges with Prime Minister Narendra Modi by launching an all-out demonetisation tirade against him and even floating an idea of displacing him by encouraging a coup in the saffron party the senior Trinamool Congress leaders mostly MPs feel: for the BJP-led Centre to come back harder is just a matter of time now.
“The fear of our victimisation at the hands of the CBI and ED has become very real because they are genuinely vindictive,” said a Trinamool MP whose name also figures in the multi-crore Saradha or Rose Valley chit fund scams.
The worried leader quoted the Chief Minister as asking her colleagues: to put up a brave front because “you can still remain relevant even if you are arrested on frivolous charges.” Already prominent Trinamool leaders and MPs Sudip Bandopadhyay and Tapas Paul are in jail for their alleged involvement in the Rose Valley scam worth more than `20,000 crore.
At least seven more senior leaders including MPs and Ministers are on the CBI-ED’s watch list for their chit fund role. Adding to their woes is a pending petition in the Calcutta High Court seeking CBI investigation in the Narada bribery case where at least a dozen Trinamool Congress leaders including MPs, Ministers and others were shown accepting handshake money from a sting journalist posing as a prospective investor.
Already a group of Trinamool leaders have started wondering whether it was a right tactic to mess with the Prime Minister during demonetization, “when you have so many court cases to deal with.”
However some other leaders hoped Modi might not show too keen an interest in Bengal as long as Banerjee did not single him out for attacks. More so because she had not only desisted from campaigning for the Uttar Pradesh polls but also she allowed the Budget Session to function peacefully.
A section of the Trinamool top brass is also worried about the pressure being built by the State saffron leadership in Delhi for quick action in ponzi and Narada cases particularly after the State police implicated some BJP leaders in the recently busted infant-racketing case. The BJP holds Mamata Banerjee responsible for the arrest of BJP leaders including a former State committee member and a doctor in Kolkata and a State women’s wing leader.
According to sources Banerjee has for the time being rearranged her pawns in a defensive position by allowing 4-5 senior leaders including Mukul Roy, Subroto Bakshi, Derek O’Brien and Partho Chatterjee to handle the BJP at national level.
At popular level Banerjee has decided to lay stress on social schemes by speeding up her pet projects like ‘Khadya Saathi’ (`2-a-kg rice), ‘Sabuj Saathi’ (free cycles to poor students) etc. It is another matter however that a section of the party has questioned the schemes that “borders mass bribery programmes.”
They have proposed more concrete schemes — like land and panchayat reforms — taken by the left after they came to power enabling them to remain there for three decades.
At political level Banerjee is also known to have instructed her party men not to attack the left and the Congress or force them to join the Trinamool as has been the practice for the past five years when the opposition workers were often threatened at gun point or with law suits to join the Trinamool Congress.
The Trinamool does not want to create a vacuum by erasing the main Opposition left so that an aggressive BJP rushes in to fill in the void, insiders said. On whether Banerjee would continue her tirade against Modi a senior leader and a State Minister said “the Chief Minister is a true politician who does not raise issues for the sake of it. She will take things up whenever the people are in danger.”