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Monday, May 18, 2009
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Mamata sets her sights on Assembly polls

Marcus Dam

— Photo: Arunangsu Roy Chowdhury

Mamata Banerjee at a press conference in Kolkata on Sunday.

KOLKATA: After the major success in West Bengal, the Trinamool Congress leadership is now looking towards convincing its ally, the Congress — which is all set to lead the next government at the Centre — of bringing forward the date of the Assembly elections in the State due two years from now.

In fact, Trinamool chief Mamata Banerjee had made clear in the presence of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at an election rally, where they shared the dais earlier this month, that she would be seeking early Assembly elections. She reiterated her intention to do so even before the final results of the Lok Sabha polls were formally declared.

For Ms. Banerjee, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) has been “wiped out but the final wiping it out of the State will [have to] be done.” The party has “lost its right to rule in West Bengal,” the Trinamool chief has asserted.

That Ms. Banerjee has had her sights set on the 2011 Assembly elections was amply evident in her pre-election rhetoric. And even though considerations of the need for a stable government at the Centre might have partly governed the voting pattern in the State as it did in several other parts of the country, the Trinamool chief, who has never had it so good, is harping on the fact that the verdict was for a change of government at the State and a vote of “no-confidence” in it.

If indeed it were a vote for change, Ms. Banerjee would understandably not want to let go of the momentum: hence the need for early Assembly polls.

Given the number of seats won by the United Progressive Alliance, the Congress will be less fettered while considering her pleas for early Assembly polls. No longer will it require for its survival the support of Left parties as it had for more than four years during the UPA government’s previous tenure — a period during which Ms. Banerjee had frequently attacked it for not acting on her demand for the dismissal of the State government. She had also dubbed the Congress as a “B” team of the CPI(M).

Much water has flowed under the bridge since then. Slighted at the Left parties’ decision to withdraw their support to the UPA government over the India-U.S. nuclear deal, the Congress leadership, particularly at the Centre, was biding its time to get back at the Left. Where else but in West Bengal, given that elections were due there in 2011?

Past animosities and bitterness were hurriedly buried under the hatchet. Despite cries of “surrender” from a section of its leaders in the State, the Congress leadership saw in the Lok Sabha elections an opportunity to cobble up an electoral adjustment with the Trinamool and went ahead with it.

Equally desperate for an understanding that would minimise chances of a split in the anti-Left vote was the Trinamool — one that has worked in favour of both the parties.

The leader of the Trinamool-Congress combine was indubitably Ms. Banerjee, who played a pivotal role in the Left debacle in the Lok Sabha elections — one that she has been referring to for long as the “semi-final.” It is now up to the government at the Centre, to be led by the Congress, to take a call on her plea for a revision in the dates of the “finals” — the Assembly elections.

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