The dramatic walkout by Trinamool Congress supremo and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee from the Niti Aayog meeting in New Delhi underlines her determination to spearhead the Opposition campaign against the Modi regime.
Interestingly, while other Opposition chief ministers decided to simply boycott the Niti Aayog meeting alleging the Centre’s bias against state governments other than those ruled by the BJP or its allies, Mamata chose to break ranks with the explicit purpose of creating a scene at the event and grabbing headlines.
Accusing the organisers of muting her microphone in the middle of her fiery speech against the NDA government and giving her less time to speak than the chief ministers belonging to the BJP, she sought to prove why the Opposition's state governments can no longer work with New Delhi.
Having so ably thwarted the BJP’s bid to make inroads into West Bengal in the recent Lok Sabha polls and the recent bypolls, Mamata and her party have been emboldened to use every opportunity to embarrass the central government by taking a confrontationist line.
This is evident from the aggressive tone adopted by Trinamool Congress members in Parliament. Parliament began with a mockery of the diminished profile of the Prime Minister and the BJP by party MPs like Mohua Maitra and Kalyan Bannerjee. Adding fuel to the fire, Abhishek Banerjee, the Trinamool supremo’s nephew and political heir, deliberately baited Lok Sabha speaker Om Birla during the budget debate. They often entered a word-slanging match that appeared to leave the latter both furious and flummoxed.
When the young third-time parliamentarian began discussing the economic impact of Prime Minister Modi’s 2016 demonetisation, the Speaker intervened, requesting that Banerjee focus on the current budget rather than policies from nearly a decade ago. Banerjee swiftly punctured Birla by countering that he did not seem to have any problems debating the Emergency more than half a century ago in the House, leaving him at a loss for words.
The BJP appears baffled at its inability to breach Mamata’s bastion after an initial breakthrough in the 2019 elections. It has been pushed back by the Bengal firebrand’s clever use of Bengali sub-nationalism in a state fiercely protective of its own culture, language and traditions.
Despite anti-incumbency over the years that has dented the CM’s earlier appeal, she has successfully managed to raise the bogey of “outsiders” invading Bengal through local collaborators to keep the BJP at bay. The Opposition persists in using Prime Minister Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah—both Gujaratis—as the face of its outreach instead of a credible Bengali leader.
What made matters worse for the BJP is the recent pronouncement by the Bengal BJP chief Sukanto Majumdar, the Central Minister of State for Development of the North-eastern Region, that the northern part of Bengal should be treated as a part of the Northeast. While Majumdar attempted to consolidate his and the party’s base in North Bengal, his brash proclamation provided Mamata with political dynamite to use against the central government.
The Trinamool Congress has lost no time in charging New Delhi with attempting to partition Bengal, touching a raw nerve in a state that has historically been partitioned twice before. The party has also reminded citizens of the violent and sustained agitation some years back by non-Bengali speaking Gorkha people in the Darjeeling Hills in North Bengal, demanding a separate state of Gorkhaland, which was where the BJP first made headway decades ago.
Describing the central minister’s statement as both “secessionist and unconstitutional,” several Trinamool parliamentarians and state legislators have demanded his resignation. They have pounced on what they claim is a ‘central conspiracy’ to carve up West Bengal since the BJP has failed to capture power both in the state assembly and win a significant number of seats in national polls.
Unsurprisingly, caught on the back foot, Bengali BJP leaders have been rapidly distancing themselves from the state party chief and central minister’s statement.
Aware of the strong backlash among the Bengali population which comprises the majority in the state, there is reported private pressure from within the party to remove Majumdar from the state unit chief’s post and change his ministry. In public, BJP leaders in the state have gone out of their way to swear allegiance to their Bengali identity and the integrity of the geographical boundaries of West Bengal.
However, there is little doubt that Mamata Banerjee will use this opportunity to further buttress her image as “Banglar Nijery Meye” (Bengal’s daughter)—the sole defender of outsiders who want to weaken and divide the state. Unless the BJP can come up with a leader who can match her Bengali sub-nationalism, she will continue to be seen as a defender against "outsiders" and it will be difficult for Modi to get the upper hand in the near future.
(The writer is a Delhi-based senior journalist and the author of ‘Behenji: A Political Biography of Mayawati’. This is an opinion piece. The views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)
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