Mamata: Desperate Times

B Prasant

WHEN Trinamul Congress chieftain, Mamata Banerjee chose not to face the media on May 27, the message that went out was clear.  Rejected by the BJP central leadership, powerless to extract mileage from her supposed closeness to prime minister Vajpayee, and unable to live with the fact that she was losing her clout over her colleagues, she finally chose to shut herself up and away from the scions of the corporate media who were no longer quite as enamoured of her as earlier, now that the rural polls saw the Trinamul Congress (and the BJP) put to the rout.

Earlier, during her last encounter with the media on May 25 she cut a sorry figure when she was seen doodling on a piece of paper for hours together as her colleagues sat silently by with the fax from BJP’s central leadership lying as a piece of damning evidence of her worsening position.  The fax message, it transpired, mentioned briefly that in view of the Trinamul Congress’s querulous attitude towards the choice to make Sudip Bandyopadhyay a minister in the latest cabinet reshuffle, no one from her party would considered for a ministerial position.

The gloom that had pervaded the residence of Mamata Banerjee and her newly-set up party office at Tiljala in east Kolkata since then has extended a lengthening shadow over the rightist consolidation that had taken place prior to the Panchayat polls.  Her relationship with the past president of the state unit of the BJP, Tapan Sikdar was combative to put it mildly.  Now, Tathagata Roy, RSS activist and Sikdar’s replacement, too, is falling out with her thanks to her obduracy in bypassing him while getting in touch with the BJP in Delhi.

The fact that there has been no mahajot (grand alliance) of the Pradesh Congress, the Trinamul Congress, and the BJP for the upcoming municipal polls scheduled for June 22, and the fact for the Vidyasagar Assembly by-election, the Pradesh Congress candidate is Trinamul Congress MP Ajit Panja’s daughter, explains the desperate way Mamata Banerjee had rushed to Panja’s residence to commiserate with him about health matters when it is a well-known fact that the relationship between the two has been one long tale of insinuations and counter-insinuations over ‘political morality.’