Mobilenews24x7 Bureau
Whataever one may say but one thing is indisputable that West Bengal chief minister has a stand apart reputation of being a lady who has withstood several political headwinds right from Jyoti Basu to Modi juggernaut with guts.
Now her and Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal’s efforts to forge an opposition unity is being looks in askance. Both being crusaders in their own right, many things remain in between to be erased for a middle path if at all it aims at taking on the mighty challenge from the BJP.
She had stood albeit on a wheel chair to give the BJP a befitting fight and tried to remove the saffron footprints in West Bengal in 2021 polls..
In the present political scenario, ‘Didi’ has become the rallying point for political parties looking for an umbrella of a lasting coalition to take on the “autocratic” BJP.
While talking about Kejriwal a mention about his doggedness to dare a huge enemy like the BJP and not once but twice.
Although Kejriwal is always noncommittal about an opposition unity yet he has been meeting other prominent opposition heavy weights regarding a parallel wall being built to check-mate the BJP.
However, his outreach has remained selective and thrust was more on AAP national image push than being under any umbrella.
So now the quest of AAP mainly remains at an alliance of sort in the Rajya Sabha to counter the BJP brought ordinance to block the Central Ordinance to set up a National Capital Civil Service Authority so that powers of AAP remained pathetically curtailed.
Of course besides the immediate crisis of the Kejriwal government, the talks centered around the possibility of a wider national coalition of Opposition parties to defeat the BJP in the 2024 Parliament elections.
Prior to Kejriwal, Akhilesh Yadav of the Samajwadi Party, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, and Tejashwi Yadav visited Mamata Banerjee with the same mission of Opposition solidarity. In between, Mamata Banerjee herself held parleys with MK Stalin of Tamil Nadu and Uddhav Thackeray of Maharashtra.
There is realization among all that a unity is essential but, even if it is forged, the Congress would always remain the road lock given their national image (although beleaguered) till the last whistle on Karnataka poll results.
Unyielding Congress
There comes the power for the Congress to bargain more in case of such a conclave after the recent poll victory.
Nothing would satisfy the Congress anything short of projecting Rahul Gandhi as the prime ministerial candidate when a consensus would be too hard to be built.
What is common is that both Kejriwal and Mamata are somehow jittery regarding the Congress victory in K’taka. It is something to be read in between the lines.
Why both Didi and Kejriwal avoided taking the Congress’ name after their meeting in Kolkata. There are deep-rooted problems in fixing a coalition that is still splintered and incongruous. In the collective act of forging a coalition, stakeholders are unwilling to yield grounds.
The TMC’s senior leadership in West Bengal admits it is a tightrope walk for the party. On one hand, it can hardly afford to walk the path alone and isolate itself from national political trends with the ED, CBI and other central agencies’ mounting pressure on several ongoing cases, including the unfolding of a cash-for-job scam in West Bengal. The TMC’s topmost leader, Secretary General Partha Chatterjee, is in jail on corruption charges for over 300 days and had been suspended from the party.
