While commenting on the relationship between Mamata Banerjee and her Trinamool Congress with the INDIA bloc, Kharge said that Chowdhury was “no one to make decisions” on the matter, which is up to the “high command”.
Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge’s public put-down of the West Bengal veteran of many political and electoral battles, Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury — who, apart from being one of the few Congress leaders in West Bengal who still commands popular support, was leader of the Congress in the outgoing Lok Sabha — is a reminder of the party’s infamous and imperious high command culture.
While commenting on the relationship between Mamata Banerjee and her Trinamool Congress with the INDIA bloc, Kharge said that Chowdhury was “no one to make decisions” on the matter, which is up to the “high command”. This was in response to Chowdhury saying, earlier, that Banerjee — who has chosen not to be part of INDIA in West Bengal, as a result of which the TMC is fighting alone in all the state’s seats — is an “opportunist leader” who is “hand in glove with BJP”.
If Kharge’s unseemly snub to a party colleague points to a Congress syndrome, Banerjee’s changing positioning vis a vis the joint Opposition alliance points to an unresolved problem of the INDIA bloc in a high stakes battle against the BJP. From being a “founder member” of INDIA, the TMC all but left the alliance when it could not come to a seat-sharing arrangement in Bengal with the Congress and Left Front. Banerjee said last week that the TMC would provide “outside support” if a non-BJP government is formed at the Centre.
A day later, she amended that to say that the TMC was “a part of INDIA”. By all accounts, the bruising acrimony and violence that scars the ground-level competition in West Bengal, and parties’ different political calculations — while the TMC is fighting to retain its dominance, it is a battle for survival for Congress and the Left— has made an Opposition alliance in the state all but impossible. But Bengal only illustrates a problem that the INDIA front faces nationally — the difficult navigation of conflicting interests internally. In the process, all too often, there is a risk of losing sight of the fact that the alliance is people-facing.
INDIA leaders should know that questions of “outside support” or joining the government only arise after June 4, if at all. For now, in the poll arena, many voters are asking: Who and what is the alternative to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the dominant BJP? The answer need not be one person, or one party. The Opposition could make the argument that it has several capable leaders. But it first needs to look less like a grouping that is so caught up with its internal jostling that it has forgotten that an election is on — and the voters are watching.
