Kolkata: With just two days to go for the Trinamool Congress’s 31 December deadline for a decision on seat-sharing in West Bengal, the Opposition’s 28-party INDIA bloc appears no closer to resolving the impasse.
At an INDIA bloc meeting on 19 December, TMC supremo and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee — backed, according to party sources, by the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and Samajwadi Party (SP) — had set the deadline for her party, the Congress, and the Left front to arrive at a seat-sharing agreement in West Bengal. The state has 42 parliamentary seats, of which the TMC had won 22, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won 18, and the Congress won 2 in the 2019 general election.
The TMC has been looking to play a leading role within the INDIA bloc.
However, on 21 December — two days after Mamata’s deadline — a delegation from the West Bengal Congress unit led by its chief Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury met the All India Congress Committee (AICC) to put forth its reservations about allying with TMC, said Congress leaders reached by ThePrint.
According to TMC sources, the party is willing to part with no more than two seats. But this appears to be unacceptable to the Congress, with a senior leader of the Bengal Congress telling ThePrint that Chowdhury has even expressed his willingness to fight solo in Bengal. The senior leader further said that an internal assessment showed that the Congress can give a strong fight in at least nine seats, of which it’s likely to clinch five.
West Bengal Pradesh Congress leader Subhankar Sarkar, who attended the meeting, told ThePrint that the Bengal Congress has acknowledged its organisational weakness in the state. But with the parliamentary election knocking on the door, nothing much can be done about this, he said.
“We don’t have time and we need to defeat the BJP. Since we are part of the INDIA platform, we must respect our allies and formulate the best possible way to take this fight forward,” Sarkar said.
But he also hinted that the Congress, which sees Mamata’s party as the principal reason for its decimation in the state, was reluctant to have an alliance with the TMC.
“In the meeting, we were asked about how the Congress stands in Bengal, and we told our leadership that organisationally we are weak but can fight solo,” Sarkar said, but added that the state unit would go with whatever its national leadership decides.
But even when the TMC holds its deadline as “non-negotiable”, there’s another major hurdle to the seat-sharing talks — the rivalry between Mamata’s party and the Left Front, in particular, with the Communist Party of India (Marxist). This strife, which dates back over a decade, means that the CPI(M) sees the TMC — the party that ended over three decades-long communist rule in the state in 2011 — as its principal rival.
Barring a few joint protests in Parliament — such as over the 13 December security breach in Parliament and the subsequent suspension of 146 opposition MPs from the Winter Session — the two have never seen eye-to-eye over anything.
A senior CPI(M) politburo leader told ThePrint that the party counts both the BJP and TMC are its political rivals.
ThePrint reached TMC spokesperson Kunal Ghosh via calls and text messages. This report will be updated if and when a response is received.
However, a senior TMC MP who didn’t want to be named told ThePrint that the party will decide its next step if no seat sharing numbers are discussed by 31 December. “It’s likely to be a virtual meeting. The TMC has also made it clear that it is in a commanding situation in West Bengal and Congress should settle on their terms for the state,” this leader said.
Political observers believe it would be difficult to bring the TMC and the CPI(M) together. “The Congress and the TMC can easily join hands but it would be difficult for the Left Front to form an alliance with TMC in West Bengal as they have been fighting each other over a number of issues on the ground,” political analyst Udayan Bandopadhyay told ThePrint.
“The Congress leaders are also equally vocal, but their central leadership is with Mamata Banerjee. (Whereas) the central leadership of CPI(M) has categorically denied any alliance with the TMC in West Bengal,” Bandopadhyay further said.
Meanwhile, Congress’s national alliance committee — the five-member panel instituted specifically for seat-sharing negotiations with its other allies — met the party’s West Bengal leadership Thursday, ThePrint has learnt. Party sources said that this meeting came after the Congress’s Nagpur rally and that similar discussions are currently underway for other states.
The panel will submit detailed recommendations to Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge and seat-sharing talks are expected to start next week, the sources said.
When asked about seat-sharing in West Bengal, a senior national-level leader told ThePrint: “We are ready to compromise”.
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Impossible alliance?
Before the 2021 West Bengal assembly election, the Congress formally allied with the CPI(M) and the Indian Secular Front (ISF), a two-year-old party that fought the election under a symbol it borrowed from the Rashtriya Secular Majlis Party, a Bihar-based political party. The alliance’s performance was abysmal — of the three, only the ISF managed to win any seat (Bhangar in South 24 Parganas) out of West Bengal’s 294.
The Congress and the CPI(M), meanwhile, saw their vote shares dip to an all-time low — while the latter secured 4.8 percent votes, down from 20.1 percent in the previous election in 2016, the former’s went to 3 percent from 12.4 percent. This was the first time that neither Congress nor CPI(M) had an MLA in the assembly.
The TMC, on the other hand, swept the election with 213 seats while BJP, with 77 seats, emerged as the principal opposition in the state.
According to West Bengal Pradesh Congress Committee Convener Amitava Chakraborty, the party’s alliance with the Left front has been accepted throughout the state and poses no threats. The TMC, however, is a different story — the party, he said, had demolished the Congress’s organisational strength in the state. Therefore, allying with it “wouldn’t send the right message to the party workers”, Chakraborty told ThePrint.
“It’s the TMC that has set a 31 December deadline, we’re not in a hurry. We haven’t deliberated on seat-sharing numbers so far. The TMC cannot set the terms on how the Congress will function,” he said, although he too added that the Bengal unit will “follow the orders of AICC”.
As a result of the resistance from the state unit, there’s no headway in seat-sharing, with Congress’s Rajya Sabha MP Pradeep Bhattacharya, who had to skip the Delhi meeting due to ill health, telling ThePrint that there were no further meetings held to discuss the issue.
But the TMC too appears keen to give no ground. While addressing a public programme at North 24 Parganas Thursday, Mamata said that only the TMC can help fight the BJP in Bengal. “INDIA bloc will fight the BJP across India. But in Bengal TMC will fight. Only TMC can teach BJP a lesson in Bengal and show the path to the country,” she reportedly said.
According to Snigdhendu Bhattacharya, a political analyst and author of ‘Mission Bengal: A Saffron Experiment’, the Congress can either go with the Left or the TMC “but there is no possibility of the CPI(M) and the TMC coming together”.
“Despite the CPI(M) identifying the BJP as a greater danger than any regional party at the national level, their Bengal vote bank is essentially anti-TMC, possibly more anti-TMC than anti-BJP,” he told ThePrint.
With inputs from Amogh Rohmetra
(Edited by Uttara Ramaswamy)
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