THE Pradesh Congress, after a bit of characteristic hemming-and-hawing, has finally chosen to sever ties with the Trinamul Congress. In a statement issued in Kolkata on July 29, Pradesh Congress leadership said that with the Trinamul Congress choosing to sit in the treasury benches in the parliament, the Pradesh Congress "has no alternative but to dissolve the alliance with that party."

Several Pradesh Congress leaders subsequently made little secret of their unalloyed pleasure after having managed to get rid of a "fractious political group under the autocratic control of one individual."

Bitter words have been uttered from both partners of the alliance right from the time the electoral understanding was entered upon as a tool of convenience. Pradesh Congress chiefs dubbed the Trinamul Congress as the "come-lately yet pretentious" entity in Bengal politics.

Mamata Banerjee on her part kept making snide references to the Pradesh Congress as a "bunch of elderly second-rate leaders who were part of the problem and not of the solution."

Former Congress leader, and presently a "well-wisher of Mamata and her boys," Siddharta Sankar Ray nearly let the cat out of the bag on poll eve with his calculated remark about the Trinamul Congress remaining very much a part of the NDA.

Former mentor of Mamata Banerjee and presently disgruntled MP, Ajit Panja proved through his unique kind of dramatization the sordid interplay of forces going on between the "new" and the "old" Congresses. And he went on to set up a state unit of the NDA in Bengal a couple of weeks ago embarrassing the camp followers of Mamata Banerjee no end.

The writing on the wall was of course very clear to observers of the Bengal political scene from long back. The game plan of Mamata Banerjee was to extract the maximum possible political mileage from the alliance with the Pradesh Congress, win as many seats as possible, get to form the government in Bengal, and then ditch the Pradesh Congress to run back to the fold of the NDA.

She, of course, has achieved a part of the ploy she had visualized. She did enter into a temporary alliance with the Pradesh Congress. She did manage to renege the alliance once the poll process was over. And she is now duly ready to scurry back to the NDA, the latest salvo from Jana Krishnamurthy at the BJP’s national executive meeting notwithstanding.

Alas, in the process, she also proceeded to lose the Bengal polls by an embarrassingly heavy margin, but the margin was merely as heavy as that suffered from by the "united’ Congress in 1996.

Perhaps she is left wondering as to what could she have done to warrant a trenchant prime ministerial comment about her being the "C" team of the Left Front even as she goes through the paces of "settling down" for her slightly off-colour second innings in the NDA.