On April 5, addressing a rally in Debanandapur in Hooghly district, Trinamool Congress supremo Mamata Banerjee said, “I will win Bengal with one leg and in the future, will get victory in Delhi with two legs.”
The reference was to the injury she suffered in one leg in Nandigram on March 10 that left her wheelchair-bound.
Mamata has fulfilled her first vow by registering a resounding victory. But despite the excitement her landslide win generated in the Opposition camp, it would be naïve to think she could emerge as an acceptable face for the Opposition ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.
Not much should be seen in the warm greetings extended to her by the entire spectrum of the Opposition - Sharad Pawar, Lalu Prasad, Akhilesh Yadav, Omar Abdullah, Sanjay Raut, Mehbooba Mufti. After all, Mamata has given a bloody nose to their sworn enemy and it was a moment to rejoice for them.
But to see Mamata’s Bengal victory as the beginning of a process of consolidation of the anti-BJP Opposition camp would be grossly misleading.
When Rahul Gandhi-led Congress wrapped up the Assembly polls of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Rajasthan in the 2018 Lok Sabha polls, a loud buzz was created that the Opposition could accept Rahul as the genuine claimant for the Prime Minister’s post. Subsequent events showed that apart from a hand-holding coming together of Opposition parties in Bangalore, nothing ever happened to coalesce the Opposition parties into a cohesive force with a single unifying political and economic narrative. Instead of unity, the Opposition badly fell apart on the issue of the leadership and gave a complete walkover to Narendra Modi.
Mamata has exhibited a clear ambition to take on Modi at the national level. Her two-leg remark is a clear expression of this desire. Her letter to the Opposition leaders ahead of the second phase of the West Bengal polls is being seen as a clear indication that she would like to play a dominant role in unifying the opposition. In her letter, addressed to the majority of the Opposition parties except the Left, Mamata asked them to unite against the BJP’s “one-party authoritarian the rule” and proposing that they chart a plan of action after the ongoing polls.
The three-page letter was addressed to more than a dozen non-BJP leaders, including Congress president Sonia Gandhi, NCP chief Sharad Pawar, Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray, Aam Aadmi Party convener and Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal, RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav, Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav, DMK president MK Stalin, PDP chief Mehbooba Mufti and NC president Farooq Abdullah.
Mamata’s effort to unify the Opposition and lead it will conflict with the ego and ambition of a range of leaders, who are not ready to concede even an inch of their turf to forge a united front to take on the BJP. Regional parties want the Congress should not contest from those States where the grand old party has only a symbolic presence. This, they think, would prevent the division of the anti-BJP votes. The Congress is unlikely to agree to any such proposition that would further reduce its presence across the country.
The first such challenge would arise in the next year’s Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections. If Mamata has genuine national ambition she would have to proactively engage with Opposition leaders to explore the possibility of unitedly taking on the BJP.
What if the Congress once again wrested Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka from the BJP, retained Chhattisgarh and Punjab from the BJP ahead of the 2024 polls? Will it not once again bring Rahul back in the contention?
If Mamata wanted to dislodge the BJP at the Centre, her first challenge would be to settle the choice of the Opposition PM’s face well in advance and prepare an alternative narrative and economic policy to bring Opposition parties under a common umbrella. That would require willingness on their parts, in some cases, to sacrifice their individual identity and agenda. Achieving that would be a tall order for Mamata, who has mostly batted only on the favourable Bengal turf for that decade.
