Need to return to ideals of Constitution

On a five-day visit to New Delhi last week, West Bengal Chief Minister, Mamata Banerjee held consultations with leaders of several parties on forging a united front to take on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party in the 2024 parliamentary elections.

She was on her first visit to the national capital after beating back a no-holds-barred campaign by Modi to dislodge her Trinamool Congress (TMC) and bring West Bengal under the BJP flag.

She made the customary courtesy call on the Prime Minister before beginning talks with opposition leaders. The BJP was not a big player in West Bengal, the largest state of eastern India, until recently. It engineered defections from TMC before the 2019 parliamentary elections and bagged 18 of the state’s 42 Lok Sabha seats. This emboldened Modi to attempt to capture power in the state.

The spectacular victory in the Assembly elections raised Mamata Banerjee’s stock nationally. She is now aspiring to play a role at the national level.

Even as the election battle in Bengal was on, she had written to the leaders of regional parties which are wielding power in states, impressing upon them the need to come together to safeguard their interests. Some observers viewed it as an attempt to create a Federal Front to check inroads by the BJP-led Centre.

During the Delhi visit she said the immediate task is to put an end to the Modi regime. “The game is on” was her battle-cry during the Assembly elections. “The game will now be fought across the nation,” she said in Delhi.

She projected the 2024 elections as a Modi vs Rest of India match. She began the effort to put together a Rest of India team with a visit to Sonia Gandhi, who has been holding charge as interim President of the Congress since her son, Rahul Gandhi, stepped down owning moral responsibility for the party’s poor performance in the 2019 elections.

She later met Aam Admi Party leader and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejrival. Like her, he is a leader who has beaten back determined BJP challenges. She also had a meeting with Kanimozhi, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam MP and daughter of former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M Karunanidhi.DMK is a constituent of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance. Mamata Baerjee is expected to meet Karunanidhi’s son, MK Stalin, who became the Chief Minister after DMK trounced All-India Anna DMK, which had an alliance with the BJP, in this year’s Assembly elections.

From Delhi, Mamata Banerjee talked on the phone with former Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav and former Bihar Chief Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav.

Akhilesh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party and Lalu Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal, now led by his son, Tejaswi, are parties committed to secularism. They have stood resolutely against the BJP’s Hindutva ideology. As such, they are natural choices as partners of an anti-BJP coalition.

She plans to reach out soon also to several others including Odisha’s Biju Janata Dal Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik and Kerala’s Communist Party of India (Marxist) Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan.

Perceiving the Congress as his party’s main rival, Patnaik had made an alliance with the BJP in 2014. He gave it up in 2019. The plan to draw CPI(M) into the alliance is surprising as it is TMC’s bitterest foe in Bengal.

The CPI(M) has been at daggers drawn with the Congress since its inception. Some time ago the party’s Politburo allowed its units in states other than Kerala to join hands with the Congress against the BJP.  

Both the Congress and the CPI(M) have a need to maximise their gains in Kerala. A combined challenge to the BJP in the state is, therefore, unlikely. Mamata Banerjee’s meeting with Sonia Gandhi set at rest speculation that the Federal Front idea she had mooted was an ant-BJP, anti-Congress grouping. The Congress is now only a pale image of the party that had led the governments at the Centre and in the states in the early days of Independence. Yet it remains the opposition party with the widest national reach.

Mamata Banerjee’s Rest of India concept is based on the realistic assumption that neither the Congress-led UPA nor the Federal Front can mount an effective challenge to the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance on their own. But, together, they can.  Bringing small national parties and regional parties on a common platform is no easy task. Almost all of them had come up fighting the Congress. Some of them probably still distrust the Congress more than the BJP.   

Apart from the mutual animosities of parties, which are a legacy of history, conflicting personal ambitions of old and new leaders also pose problems for the Rest of India. The cricket analogy cannot be of help here as there is no Board of Control to name the captain.

When the Janata Party was put together by merging four parties to take on Indira Gandhi’s Emergency regime, an elder statesman, Jayaprakash Narayan, was available to decide who should be the captain.

Later, as elections threw up hung Parliaments, then CPI(M) General Secretary Harkisshen Singh Surjeet played the role of kingmaker. Since then, the CPI(M) has lost its sheen. The present General Secretary, Sitaram Yechury, may not, therefore, be able to play that role.

There is already speculation about Mamata Banerjee’s intention. Will she be a kingmaker like Surjeet, or will she want to occupy the throne?

In the opposition ranks there are several leaders who, by virtue of their political experience, can legitimately aspire to be the Prime Minister. Mamata Banerjee, who has just begun her third successive term as Chief Minister is one of them.

Projection of a prime ministerial candidate at an early stage will hamper the unity efforts. It is, therefore, advisable to begin with a collective leadership, drawn from different parties. It must prepare a roadmap for the next two years and oversee time-bound implementation of all that needs to be done before the elections. Leaders must set aside personal ambitions for the time being. The immediate issue is not who will lead the next government but what policies it will pursue.

Motivated by narrow partisan considerations, the Modi regime took several legislative and administrative measures which invited criticism on various grounds, including violation of citizens’ rights. These have caused much damage to the national fabric and disrupted national unity.

The opposition alliance must give the highest priority to restoration of national unity. It must think of the next government as one whose primary task is national reconstruction.

They can prepare for it by setting up panels chaired by opposition stalwarts to review the various measures taken by the Modi regime and formulate alternative measures, wherever necessary. Working together on such issues will help achieve clarity and cohesion in their approach to complex problems and place before the people alternatives that are in tune with the constitutional ideals.

Hopefully, in the process a team captain will also rise.