“The Left can also be right,” said Mamata Banerjee at a media interaction. Among the stumbling blocks to seat-sharing talks in West Bengal for the Lok Sabha polls are believed to be doubts over the Congress’s winnability and the party choosing the Left as an ally over the Trinamool Congress in state elections. It’s a snub that Mamata Banerjee has neither forgotten nor forgiven.
But now ahead of the INDIA front meeting in Delhi on Tuesday, the TMC charperson sounded gracious. When asked specifically by News18 about the possibility of a triangular alliance between the TMC, Congress, and Left, she said, “I am open to talks and I bear no grudges.”
Mamata Banerjee has never been able to overcome the anger and animosity towards the Left parties. That’s understandable as the genesis of the TMC and her political debut have been as staunch opponents of the Left. Because of this, she could not forgive Congress’s Rahul Gandhi and Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury for pushing stitching up an alliance with the Left bloc. It was a betrayal of trust as far as the West Bengal chief minister was concerned.
In fact, at the Mumbai meeting of the INDIA front, she had conveyed to the Congress that it was wrong of it to go ahead with the alliance with the Left despite the formation of this new opposition bloc. In fact, she had left early for Kolkata, refusing to be a part of the joint press conference.
The TMC blames the disastrous performance of the opposition in the February Tripura polls on the alliance between the Left and Congress. What upset Mamata even more was the Congress’s victory in the Sagardighi assembly bypoll this year in Bengal’s Murshidabad district.
But it has now prevailed upon Trinamool that the more the TMC, Congress, and Left fight in West Bengal, the more the Bharatiya Janata Party stands to gain. This is even as the Left has been slowly recovering lost ground in the state.
This explains Mamata Banerjee’s softened stance towards the Left. She has to ensure that the anti-BJP votes remain consolidated and this is expected to be her pitch at the INDIA front meeting.
With the BJP breathing down the TMC’s neck in Bengal and having done well in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, Mamata is ready to walk the extra mile to keep the saffron party at bay— perhaps even patch up with the once sworn enemy, the Left.
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