Barring the Congress and the DMK, almost every member of the INDIA bloc has welcomed Mamata Banerjee’s statement from last week—that if given the opportunity, she could ensure the “smooth functioning” of the Opposition alliance. And many political observers in Delhi have said, ‘why not?’. She is a seven-time MP, a three-time CM, has uprooted the Left, and has consistently kept the BJP at bay in West Bengal. None of her counterparts in INDIA can beat that, except maybe Sharad Pawar. She is significantly younger than him and in much better health, touch wood.
But if you are sitting in Kolkata, are a Mamata sceptic, and if you take a myopic view of this week’s sudden developments, the picture looks quite different and forces questions about the West Bengal chief minister’s real motive: is it to give INDIA a more effective leadership in the run-up to the 2026 state Assembly elections, and onward to the next general election in 2029, or is it to scuttle Opposition unity against the BJP by isolating the Congress. Even more succinctly put, the question really boils down to this: Is there a setting between Mamata and Narendra Modi, which is prompting the TMC chief to set the cat among the INDIA pigeons, as it were?
The last suspicion sounds outright ridiculous, given the extraordinary wheelchair–borne fight she gave the BJP in the 2021 Assembly elections as well as the spectacular, equally tough resistance to the party in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, when the odds looked stacked high against the TMC after the Sandeshkhali issue and the Modi-Amit Shah team gave TMC no quarter during their electoral campaign in the state. But in both battles, TMC not only survived but prevailed over the BJP, with the latter not even denting its rival’s soaring seat tally.
Electoral skulduggery
But stop and stare into the rearview mirror and you can’t help but begin to wonder. The view in the glass into the past is crowded with one episode after another of corruption allegedly involving TMC leaders that should have impacted the party’s electoral fortunes but didn’t. In all of these episodes, there is no sign of justice for the right and punishment for the wrong.
The Saradha ponzi scam of 2013 – in which several TMC leaders were arrested and jailed for brief periods – robbed lakhs of the poorest people of their savings; the Narada sting operation of 2016 that showed videos of a dozen TMC leaders allegedly accepting wads of cash as bribes in exchange of extending favours to a dubious businessman. Since 2019, there have been scams galore — coal, cow and education, to name the most prominent, and finally the RG Kar rape-murder case.
Terms like cut money and tolabaji – commission and extortion – were added to the vocabulary of public political discourse during the TMC’s tenure. And if the Left Front was known for something called “scientific rigging” in elections, the TMC outdid that with its own brand of alleged electoral skulduggery that included a big dose of poll violence.
Investigations into many of these cases were conducted or are still being conducted by the CBI and the ED, and numerous TMC leaders have been summoned and questioned for hours on end. And yet, while someone as senior in the Indian political hierarchy as Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal landed in jail, not one leader of matching seniority from the TMC has been put behind bars. Former West Bengal Education Minister Partha Chatterjee, who was arrested by the ED in a money laundering case in 2022, is way down on the national pecking order.
For Mamata, the compelling reason to play footsie with the BJP is to ensure that no one in the TMC, definitely not her nephew, Abhishek Banerjee, is arrested for any alleged or imagined crime. Abhishek and members of his family have been questioned numerous times by the ED and CBI in some unsavoury scams but never arrested. Besides Partha Chatterjee, a close aide of Mamata who went behind bars is her man in Birbhum district, Anubrata Mondal. He is out on bail from the Tihar Jail and his trial has not begun for the strangest reasons in the annals of law and justice surely: documents related to his case written in the Bengali language have not been translated. Mondal was arrested in August 2022 and came home on bail in September 2024, which is a period of two full years.
Also read: Abhishek Banerjee is rising in TMC. Mamata still keeping him on a tight leash
What’s in it for the BJP?
“Let us not disturb Mamata in West Bengal. If she goes, either the Left or the Congress will fill the vacuum and they are less amenable to political pressure than the TMC” – that could sum up the BJP view from New Delhi, it seems. In the off-chance that the BJP needs backing for bills in Parliament, it can turn the screws and prevail upon TMC to abstain or walk out, as has reportedly happened in the past.
What about the state BJP? Headquarters seems quite content to let the state unit make the right noises and pretend they are battle-ready against the TMC. But the leader under whom the BJP made a serious inroads into Bengal, Dilip Ghosh, has been sidelined. Under him, the BJP jumped its tally of MPs in the state from a meagre two to 18 in the year 2019. Suvendu Adhikari, who succeeded Ghosh after quitting the TMC, may have had a role in the BJP’s tally of 77 MLAs in 2021. But there has been a downslide for BJP since then, including the loss of a seat in its stronghold north Bengal in the recent bypolls.
At least one YouTuber in Bengal, a senior journalist, has perhaps delivered the Bengal unit of the BJP its worst insult. He has called it “the B-team of the TMC”. In Bengal, ‘B-team’ has a long history. For most of the 34 years that the Left was in power in the state, the Congress used to be called the CPM’s ‘B-team’ – rivals by day, friends by night. Another popular epithet for the Congress then was “watermelon”: green on the outside but red inside.
In the real world, finding a fruity equivalent for “TMC’s B-team BJP” is impossible: it has to be saffron outside and green inside. But in the world of politics, nothing is. It may be a fruit born out of a secret betrothal of convenience, but in the jaundiced view from Kolkata of Mamata sceptics with severe myopia, nothing in politics is impossible. And the fiery, mercurial Mamata’s motives in offering to lead INDIA may be more than purely altruistic.
Monideepa Banerjie is a senior journalist based in Kolkata. She tweets @Monideepa62. Views are personal.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)
Finally Monideepa! Congratulations for being brave and spitting the truth. There are no Ifs and Buts. It is exactly this. BJP has no organisation left in WB and doesn’t want to lose principal opposition position. Mamata is protecting her kin and personal contacts from the law. I however hope, the same kin and herself face the wrath some day. The unimaginable pain Abhaya had to live through in her last moments and the one her parents will carry for the rest of their lives, must come back to Mamata with 10x force. Only then, justice will be served and will be bigger than what Indian law can deliver.
Finally, an article of substance from Ms. Monideepa Banerjie. Kudos!