Prime Minister Narendra Modi has already retired to a cave. Ostensibly, to meditate, but surely also to cool off after the heat and dust of a nearly two-month-long campaign for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. Come 4 June, many political leaders—winners and losers—will also head to the hills to catch their breath. Let’s not grudge them a break. It’s been a gruelling campaign.
But there’s no respite for Mamata Banerjee.
If INDIA beats all odds and she is roped in to set up a government in Delhi, it’s another story. But if it’s a runner-up, she won’t even be able to do a weekend in the cooler climes of Darjeeling. No one knows better than her that the 2024 elections were all very well but the real big fight is around the corner: the 2026 assembly elections.
A lot will depend on the outcome of 2024, of course. If INDIA beats the odds, then the Trinamool Congress (TMC)’s future trajectory will be something else. If the TMC hits more than 30 seats, the three-term chief minister may just dash for a day or two to the beaches of Digha. Anything less than 30 or something around the 2019 status quo—Bharatiya Janata Party’s 18 and TMC’s 22 seats, out of 42—and Mamata will have to put her nose to the grindstone for a fourth shot at West Bengal’s top job the moment the fat lady has sung for 2024.
Exuding confidence, the TMC says it will get double of whatever the BJP gets, so optimally, BJP 14 and TMC 28. The BJP scoffs and claims it will get 30 seats. And its state unit chief Sukanta Majumdar has a post-election strategy all worked out. In an interview to PTI on 24 May, he claimed that the TMC government will not complete its full term till 2026 if the BJP gets even one more seat than the TMC in the Lok Sabha elections.
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Threat of ‘Operation Lotus’
Even if the BJP gets a couple of seats less than the TMC, there is clear and present danger as it could strike at the TMC with a fine-tuned Operation Lotus, precursors of which we have seen in some other states like Goa, Maharashtra, and Karnataka in recent years.
Possible courses of action could include deploying the central agencies against senior TMC leaders in connection with some scam or the other, and, who knows, even an arrest or two. Abhishek Banerjee, the national general secretary of the TMC and Mamata’s nephew, is a prime target and a recipient of threats by Amit Shah and Narendra Modi. Bhaipo and bhatija, they call him in a derogatory fashion.
No chance, say TMC insiders. But no denying that the party had bled badly ahead of the 2021 elections with many TMC leaders jumping ship and joining the TMC. Some have returned to mothership since then but in Modi’s recent roadshow in north Kolkata, of the four leaders sharing space with him in the jeep, three were TMC turncoats—Suvendu Adhikari, Silbhadra Dutta, and Tapas Roy.
Meanwhile, three senior TMC leaders are already “state guests”—Partha Chatterjee, ex-education minister; Jyotipriyo Mallik, ex-food and civil supplies minister; and the heavyweight Birbhum district president Anubrata Mondal. The threat of a similar fate can be unnerving.
The other tactic the BJP has used in Maharashtra, Karnataka, and West Bengal in recent years, and could deploy at any time, is the lure of the “washing machine”. Majumdar was at pains to underscore in his 24 May interview that the TMC would collapse under the weight of its own “dynasty politics” and the BJP would not have to do anything to trigger it.
But we know what happened with Ajit Pawar and Eknath Shinde. TMC leaders with some taint against their name could well be persuaded to jump into the BJP’s front or top-load machine for a very cleansing spin.
Many have done so already, including BJP’s big hope in the state, Suvendu Adhikari. He was one of the dozen or so TMC leaders seen in the Narada sting operation tapes made public in 2016, tucking away bribe money offered by a so-called businessman. In the years since, some TMC leaders were arrested and even briefly jailed. Never Suvendu. That kind of “Modi ki guarantee” can be tempting.
However, the BJP is an external threat. What about threats from within? Officially, even the mention of internal friction can bring down the party on your head. But factional fights at the grassroots level in the TMC are a fact of life. And reports of friction at the top may not all be fiction.
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Growing internal friction
In recent times, there have been reports of Mamata and Abhishek disagreeing on issues. Two disagreements that took ages to resolve were triggered when Abhishek proposed an upper age limit for party leaders in electoral politics and ‘one person one post’. Both were viewed by veterans as attempts to sideline them. It took Mamata’s personal intervention to resolve things—in favour of the veterans. Abhishek’s pound of flesh was a fair share in candidate selection. Many from his young brigade were given tickets this election—at least half a dozen, if not more.
In these fairly fragile circumstances, even the slightest setback for the TMC in the Lok Sabha elections could trigger internal tremors ahead of assembly polls and the BJP is all geared to strike when the iron is hot.
That leaves Mamata Banerjee with no option but to start working on 2026 even before the heat and dust have settled on 2024. Of course, nothing gets her going like a big political fight. But after founding a political party a quarter of a century ago and leading it to one electoral success after another, she surely deserves to rest, however briefly, on her laurels.
Not happening. No Darjeeling or Digha for Didi. A fresh battle beckons.
Monideepa Banerjie is a senior journalist based in Kolkata. She tweets @Monideepa62. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)