Both the left and Congress leadership in Bengal have gone into a tizzy following reports that about 20 of their legislators are set to join the ruling Trinamool Congress.
Though their senior leaders put up a brave front in public saying this time round it would be an uphill task for the Trinamool to get Opposition MlAs to defect to their side, in private many of them said, “the Trinamool has huge amount of chit fund money which they will now spend in buying off MlAs.”
The defection rumour of got further impetus after Trinamool vice-president Mukul Roy conceded in public that there were a number of CPI(M) and Congress MlAs who were in direct touch with him and were waiting in the sidelines to join the Trinamool Congress.
“Wait for a few more days and you will see that 20 MlAs from CPI(M) and the Congress will join the Trinamool Congress as they want to be a part of the ongoing development programmes,” Roy said, adding his party did not contact these legislators, “rather they contacted us.”
The Trinamool is going to observe its Martyrs’ Day on July 21 which will be a first mass gathering of the party after Mamata Banerjee roared back to power for the second time in a row with a brute majority.
The defecting MlAs could join the Trinamool on the same day, inside sources said though Roy would not make definite comments on when such “switch over” would take place.
Taking a dig at the left-Congress alliance, Roy wondered “what is the basis of this alliance. At times one wonders what Rahul Gandhi and Buddhadeb Bhattacharya told each other when they jointly addressed a public meeting in Kolkata. Did they tell each other to forgive and forget whatever they had told against each otherIJ”
He added the MlAs who wanted to join the Trinamool were fed up with political hypocrisy of their leaders and so they had expressed their desire to join the ruling party “which is the only reliable political force in the State.”
Roy’s statement was immediately rejected by the CPI(M) and the Congress with senior Marxist leader Rabin Deb saying “they hold an expertise in engineering defection either by using money power or by showing threats but this time they will not be able to do so and there will be no defection from our party.”
State Opposition leader and Congress veteran Abdul Mannan also said that the “Trinamool is making hollow threats” and that “not a single MlA from our party will join them. They have already given a written undertaking for not doing so.”
Meanwhile, even as both the left and the Congress sources complained of silent threats being used by the Trinamool leaders to induce their elected representatives like panchayat members to join the Trinamool, PCC president Adhir Chowdhury had started plans for mass movement against what he said the “Trinamool’s dirty game plan.”