By Sujit Bhar
The decline and fall of a regime, a political party, or even a political idea rarely starts from beyond its sphere of influence. Usually, termites emerge from the very woodwork that holds up the platform on which the party’s ideologues preach, and the platform slowly weakens. To an outsider, the signs are rarely apparent. When the podium tumbles, the world just sees the sudden crash, though the process had started quite some time back.
The All India Trinamool Congress (TMC) today is all but the rubble of a once flourishing, booming mansion of ideas. Even the semblance of a cohesive unit was shattered recently when party founder Mamata Banerjee’s closest comrade-in-arms Madan Mitra finally resigned from all party posts and joined the “rival” TMC faction, being termed as the “Ritabrata TMC”. The party faction that Mamata and her nephew Abhishek Banerjee leads today is being termed as “Kalighat Trinamool”, Kalighat being the home of Mamata in south Kolkata.
This shocking incident, however, must be observed in its context. The day before Mitra resigned from all Mamata-allocated posts, said “sorry” to his mentor, packed his bags and moved over to the Ritabrata faction, which is pretty much aligned with the state Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Enforcement Directorate (ED) had sent notice to Mitra’s wife and sons in the teacher recruitment scam. That did it. Incidentally, Mitra has been walking in the thick goo of things ugly for a long while, not least till as far back as the massive Sharada chit fund scam. He had been well protected by the immense public perception that Mamata held around the state. Now Mitra moves over to another protector.
A STRONG IMAGE
Mamata’s core image, surprisingly, has not suffered that much. She is being discarded because each person leaving the TMC has hit out against the “Hitler like” position her nephew Abhisekh had supposedly assumed of late, leading to the disaster at the recent polls.
The disaster is measurable today, in sheer numbers. The other day CPI(M)-reject Ritabrata had walked out with 58 TMC MLAs, now the number has swollen to 70. The TMC had won only 80 seats in the last assembly polls that saw the Suvendu Adhikari-led state BJP sweep to power. Now the “Kalighat faction” of the TMC is left with a handful of MPs and MLAs, yet Mamata isn’t accepting the fact that every “dissenter” and “rebel”, as they are being called, has pointed his/her finger at Abhisekh.
What is on is a strange game of thrones, sans a “throne”, so to say. As the ED, the CBI and even the CID visit homes of TMC MPs, MLAs and councillors, the rebel faction roster swells. That no further action on these individuals has been reported so far, shows the true nature of the coercion. While the BJP apparently isn’t directly involved (“Let the law take its course,” said Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari), this is a very nice route the party has found to shear Mamata’s TMC, without the apparent use of direct lucre or force. Also, these “tainted” individuals are not joining the BJP; they are just congregating under an umbrella that just might have a saffron hue.
THE ECI SUPPORT
The tug-of-war between the two factions of the TMC for complete control of the party (and, of course, the crores stuck in frozen party funds) seem much like what is happening to the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) in Maharashtra. Split into two factions, the NCP (Ajit Pawar) group is part of the state government alongside the BJP and Shiv Sena (and there is a lot of chaos in that too), while the NCP-SP is the opposition party, aligned with the Maha Vikas Aghadi. There has yet to be legal clarity between the two factions, yet they exist.
The TMC split is way larger than the NCP crack, and while the Mamata faction of the TMC has submitted its response rejecting the rival group’s claim over the party on July 6 itself, the Ritabrata faction had sent a legal representative to the Election Commission of India (ECI) seeking more time.
As expected, the ECI has given yet another extension to the Ritabrata faction—till July 25—to submit their response to notices issued by the poll body regarding claims made by them on organisational elections and authorised signatories of the party.
On July 2, the ECI had written to both factions of the TMC seeking responses regarding “claims and counterclaims” made by them. July 6 was the deadline.
THE NUB OF THE MATTER
At the core of things, however, lie larger issues that neither the Ritabrata faction nor the Adhikari faction wants to look deep into. It is a matter of the alleged “taint” that had swung the exit gates open. If Mitra, who just resigned, is tainted, then so is Anubrata Mondal of Birbhum, the official “goonda” in the mix. If Adhikari’s new “Goonda Act” has any conscience, then Mondal—once known as the “unofficial younger brother” of Mamata, he has now officially joined the Ritabrata faction—should be one of the first behind bars.
Politics in Bengal, though, remains as murky as in any other part of the country. If TMC were thrown out because of its complete incompetence and the rot inside, there has been not one positive move so far from the BJP dispensation in the state to prove that the new regime has the good of the state at heart. The roads remain in a state of complete disrepair, law and order is weaker—there have already been reports of more than six rape-murder incidents, mostly POCSO cases, with one “encounter” death to boot—and roadside hawkers are being ejected with brute force, a la Uttar Pradesh.
If anything, the politics has grown murkier. Ask any man on the road and the answer would be “nothing has changed”. The interesting part of the entire narrative has been the sudden quiet on the financial controversies. Small issues of local toughs have been handled, not the shady multi-crore projects that Abhishek seemed to have started. If one cares to look around, following the sudden halt in work for a few days, construction work on almost all real estate projects have resumed. The money has kept flowing, only the channels have differed.
And as it stands today, the TMC is split between those who have already had their share of the loot and those who probably had missed the bus, but are now desperate to make amends. The shades of grey are pretty confusing.
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