Opposition, on the streets and in the House

After a staggering defeat at the hands of the BJP–ECI in the recently concluded state assembly elections, Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress, which lorded over West Bengal for 15 years, is bleeding. So heavily that political observers are wondering whether it’ll live to fight another election.

The party has begun to cannibalise itself, albeit with some help from the cash-and-investigative-agencies-rich BJP. A big breakaway faction of the party, led by an expelled leader, has been anointed as ‘the real TMC’ in the state Assembly, and it looks like the ruling BJP will face no real challenge in the House.

The streets, though, present a different picture: the first stirrings of life in a down-and-out Left; and something akin to a revival of the Congress that was last in power five decades ago, between 1972 and 1977. The current churn in the Opposition space in West Bengal has all the ingredients of a textbook case study. We conclude our two-part series.

It’s like an e-bomb was dropped on Bengal. The distribution of seats in the new House makes it look like a near rout (BJP: 207, AITC: 80), but it’s worth remembering that the TMC still polled 41 per cent of the vote (against the BJP’s 46 per cent). The psychological impact of the defeat and the witch-hunt that followed in its wake is far greater. In Kolkata’s famous addas, the discussion is no longer whether the TMC can recover but whether it will survive.

Distrust and dejection were apparent when only 20 of 80 newly elected TMC legislators turned up at a meeting convened by LoP-designate Sobhandeb Chattopadhyay on 31 May. On 3 June, the party split as 58 rebel MLAs seized control of its legislative wing and named expelled legislator Ritabrata Banerjee as their leader. Almost on cue, speaker Rathindra Bose granted the faction legitimacy as the real TMC, lending credence to doubts that they were ‘sponsored’ by the BJP, which will no doubt want a pliant Opposition.

Meanwhile, the state CID is looking into an allegation of forgery against Abhishek Banerjee. According to media reports, Banerjee, as party general-secretary, had written a covering memo to the speaker, endorsing the signatures of two TMC legislators (Ritabrata Banerjee and Sandipan Saha) who were part of the legislature party that elected Sobhandeb Chattopadhyay as LoP.

The expelled MLAs, in their formal complaint to the speaker on 27 May, claimed that no resolution selecting the LoP was adopted on 6 May, as claimed, and further that they had signed the legislature party meeting resolution book on 19 May.

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The all-too-obvious meltdown of the TMC may not, however, automatically translate into a popular consolidation that favours the BJP. The director of a leading NGO with decades of experience working in rural West Bengal says, “The TMC’s problem is that ‘floating voters’ made up almost 80 per cent of its support base, people who weren’t ideologically or organisationally tied to the party. This kind of vote dissipates as fast as it consolidates. But the BJP–RSS are mistaken if they believe that Bengal has overnight dumped its Left-leaning tradition and switched en masse to the Right.”

“We voted for the BJP, hoping to teach the TMC a lesson. Now we realise we made a mistake,” said Pabitra Mandal from South 24 Parganas, who works as a family retainer in Kolkata. “Back in my village, schools have no teachers. The young people have no work. Let the government address those issues. Instead, they are evicting hawkers, snatching away livelihoods and wasting time on who gets Annapurna assistance. We didn’t survive on doles! We were quite accustomed to buying essentials from ration shops.”

Mandal’s remarks validate the argument that the election results, to the extent that they reflect popular sentiment, were more anti-incumbency than pro-BJP. They also indicate the opening up of a new space for opposition forces to move in. The CPI(M) and other Left parties realise this and have hit the streets. They are currently fronting demonstrations on issues like hawker eviction, the plight of cattle farmers and the gag order on government employees.

“We’ll pick up these issues in a bigger way, working towards a Left consolidation that strengthens our organisation,” said Palas Das, CPI(M) state secretariat member, who showed no aversion to sharing opposition space with the Congress.

The Congress is ambivalent about TMC workers and MLAs who have reportedly approached the party. “The PCC will repeat past mistakes if they agree to let in TMC discards,” veteran Congress leader Abdul Mannan told National Herald.

Call it the real or rump TMC, but that faction, led by the doughty Mamata Banerjee, has also hit the streets. On 2 June, she addressed a rally, surrounded by the TMC old guard, many of whom had been shunted out by the Abhishek-led coterie. The party has dissolved all its organisational committees, from block to state level, for ‘a comprehensive introspection, performance review and organisational assessment’

“It’s barely a month since the BJP seized power and the shadows of fascism have already engulfed the state. A united front with the TMC, Congress and the Left has to be the answer,’’ says Pratik-ur Rehman, a former CPI(M) crowd-puller who switched to the TMC before the elections.

“A reinvented TMC and the Congress are likely to come closer,” says Dipankar Bhattacharya, general-secretary of the CPI-ML (Liberation). “The Left will dominate the opposition space by leading the agitations at the street level. If Bengal’s civil society up their game, they can emerge as the third force.”

Read part one of this series here

With inputs from Kunal Chatterjee and Gautam Bhattacharyya

Sourabh Sen is a Kolkata-based independent writer and commentator on politics, human rights and foreign affairs. More of his writing here