People's Democracy

Trinamul Congress: A Separatist Outfit?

WHEN the Jharkhand power minister, Lalchand Mahato recently chose to fulminate on the “urgent necessity of separating the three districts of Midnapore (east and west), Purulia, and Bankura from Bengal and adding them to Jharkhand,” there was lusty cheering from the assemblage at the Rabindra Bhavan at the Purulia town. 

This was understandable since it was an NDA “regional meeting” where the supporters of the different factions of the Jharkhand party were present in force.  There was more cheering when Mahato, waxing eloquent, declared that the “Communist government of Bengal has forcibly made the three districts part of the state, against the will of the people.” 

Everybody, one supposes, especially political leaders of dubious distinction and equipped with an opportunistic frame of mind, is entitled to his or her daily quota of untruths, fabrications, and plain, dyed-in-the-wool, lies. 

Lalchand Mahato was at least representing a political outfit that makes no bones about seeking to capitalise on, and draw political mileage out of, the rhetoric of separatism, “empathising” all the way, and desperately, with the so-called “tribal-non-tribal divide.” Much more noticeable was the complete and total silence that engulfed the Trinamul Congress leader, Mukul Roy, who sat on the dais, and who happens to be that party’s “all-India general secretary,” when Mahato fulminated on his separatist oratory.

Then again, the stand of Roy was not that much of a surprise. Right from its inception, the Trinamul Congress had distinguished itself as a party of desperadoes who would go to any length to “drive off the communists” and claw its way to office in Bengal.  The early flirting with the separatist Kamtapuri movement of north Bengal, with its emphasis on the creation of a separate state for the Rajbansi, to the subsequent full-fledged political alliance, pre- and post-election, with the frankly secessionist Kamtapuri Liberation Organisation, and its “political face,” the Kamtapuri People’s Party, the Trinamul Congress has never hesitated to get help from wherever it appears to be in the offing to fulfil its political ambitions, and the concept of regional integrity be damned. 

The electoral alliance that subsequently developed with the Jharkhandis themselves provides another chapter of political opportunism in the unfolding saga of the Trinamul Congress in Bengal.  Thus, the section of the corporate press that went overboard with expressing shock at the not-so-sullen silence of Mukul Roy at the Rabindra Bhavan may rest easy; the Trinamul Congress has not deviated in any manner from its historical heritage of political chicanery.