Rattled by BJP rise, Bengal CM looks to left!
West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s desire to team up with the left demonstrates her desperation over failure to stop the surge of the Bharatiya Janata Party in the State. She believes that her Trinamool Congress can halt the BJP’s progress ahead of the next Assembly election by striking some sort of an understanding with her bitter political rival. Suddenly, she finds merit in the very same left parties whom she has bitterly opposed on ideological grounds, because she discovers that communalism is a bigger threat.
The tragedy for her is that the left, for all its opposition to the BJP, is not too keen on an arrangement with the Trinamool Congress. Senior Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader Biman Bose has ruled out any understanding with Ms Banerjee who had spared no effort or no vile word to run down his party until very recently. But, since politics is the art of the possible, it will not be surprisingly if at the end of the day, the left and the Trinamool Congress, out of shared desperation, strike some kind of a deal, however couched it may be in vague specifics.
How that would go down with the cadres of the two parties, will be interesting to watch. But for now, Ms Banerjee is all alone in her fight against the BJP. Ever since the Saradha chit fund scam and now the Burdwan terror incident, the Chief Minister and her party have been steadily losing ground, which has contributed to the rise of the BJP in the State. Rather than tackle the credibility crisis by firm administrative measures, she has embarked on the politically dangerous path of wanting to take along an opposition party which can pose serious threats to her political future. After all, if the BJP is the new rival on the horizon, the left, especially the CPI(M), is an opponent licking its wounds and waiting for the right occasion to strike back at the ruling party in West Bengal. The left will not be too bothered with reviving Ms Banerjee’s fortunes but be concerned with re-establishing its own relevance. And yet, since the Chief Minister has set straws in the wind, we have to wait and see how the game plays out.
It must not be forgotten that the CPI(M) will also face a credibility issue if it responds favourably to Ms Banerjee’s overtures. The party had gone hammer and tongs against her Government over the Saradha and Burdwan incidents. Moreover, in case the unthinkable happens and the two parties get together in whatever form, the opposition space will be left wide open for the very same BJP which Ms Banerjee and the left parties have been struggling to contain. In fact, the coming together of the Trinamool Congress and the left could further energise the BJP in the State and at the national level. Meanwhile, the Congress, which would want a pie of the action, will either be left to fend for itself or use its good offices with senior leaders of the left (some of whom attended the conference the Congress had organised to mark the 125th birth anniversary of Jawaharlal Nehru) to be included into the deal. A pact of this sort would indeed be a strange way for both the left and the Congress to recover lost ground in the State. While opportunism in politics is understandable to an extent, throwing all ideological positions to the wind would be political harakiri.