Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s desperate attempt to mend fences with former ally Trinamool Congress seems to have fallen on deaf ears if the comments made by some senior Trinamool leaders are to go by.
Within a day of Singh dropping hints that his party was game for talks with the former ally —Mamata Banerjee who the Congress was “very happy to have in our Government” — the top Trinamool leadership has bluntly refused to play ball with a “corrupt outfit that is on its way out.”
While a senior Bengal Minister said the party “is not likely to make a second blunder” to go with the Congress again, Rajya Sabha MP Derek O’Brien iterated the Trinamool would go it alone in the lok Sabha elections. “We are going it alone in the elections,” he said, adding his party would, however, weigh up post-poll options of alliances.
Echoing him, former Railway Minister Mukul Roy said, “We are comfortable being alone.”When asked about the Prime Minister’s comments that he did not rule out a future alliance with the Trinamool Congress, O’Brien recounted how in the Panchayat polls his party won 13 out of 17 districts fighting singularly against the Congress, BJP and left Front.
“So, sir, Thank you, but no thanks,” he added in reactions to the Prime Minister’s offer.He said, “We would go it alone in the lok Sabha polls. Our supremo Mamata Banerjee has already called upon regional parties to come together after the polls to form a Government, which will be corruption-free and pro-people.”
The people of Bengal were with the Trinamool Congress, he maintained showing how the Trinamool won overwhelmingly in the 2009 general elections followed by successive wins in 2011 and the recently concluded panchayat elections.
In fact, he was repeating the comments earlier made by the Bengal Chief Minister who has gone on record saying one of her prime tasks was to see the back of the UPA-II. “We will make sure that this corrupt outfit does not return to power in the Centre again,” she said.
The Prime Minister’s had earlier made a circuitous offer of a re-marriage between the Congress and the Trinamool Congress which walked out of the UPA-II last year following differences between his Government and Bengal Chief Minister on a host of issues, including FDI in retail, hike in petro-prices and not the least Delhi’s refusal to accommodate Mamata Banerjee’s demand for special economic package for her debt-ridden State.
Singh had on Saturday said that his party would prefer secular parties for an electoral alliance and did not rule out any truck with the Trinamool Congress as “in politics there is no permanent enemies and permanent friends. And in many ways, a week in politics is sometimes an unusually long period of time. So I do not rule out alliances.”
This he said when asked to comment on his parties future thoughts about the Trinamool Congress. “Mamata Banerjee was very respectable member of the Congress at one time. As the leader of the Trinamool also, we were very happy to have her in our Government.”
When asked to comment on the Trinamool’s spurning of the Congress offer, West Bengal Opposition leader Surya Mishra said, “We are not concerned about others. The left Front will concentrate on improving our performance by reaching out to the people who voted us for years.”