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Point proven, Congress hungry Twin hurdles in hunt for honour
After initial signs of gloom and doom, Bengal Congress leaders are gradually spotting rays of hope in the party’s performance in the municipal elections.
While there is no doubt that the party will return to its alliance with the Trinamul Congress for the Assembly polls next year as Pranab Mukherjee and K. Keshava Rao have already indicated, Congress leaders feel that their strategy in the civic polls has paid off.
The strategy was all about the party’s survival in the face of the twin assaults from the Trinamul and the CPM. The Congress had just one point to prove: that it is still a player and Mamata Banerjee cannot ignore it in her battle against the CPM. The Congress proved that.
That Mamata will now depend on the Congress to form municipal boards even in her strongholds is a point that cannot be overlooked.
In Hooghly district, where both the Serampore and Hooghly Lok Sabha constituencies were won by Trinamul in the 2009 elections, Mamata’s party will have to be dependent on the Congress in as many as five civic bodies to form the boards.
Similarly, it has to look to the state Congress for support to run nine municipalities in North 24-Parganas that are currently hung. Trinamul had won all the five Lok Sabha seats in North 24-Parganas last year.
The question now is the impact the results can have on the state Congress.
The Bengal Congress’s hopes from the alliance with Trinamul can now grow after such a performance. This can strengthen the resolve of party satraps like the four district Congress presidents of Calcutta who sat on a dharna demanding that more Calcutta Municipal Corporation seats be given to the party.
They may argue that the state Congress should talk to Mamata, with honour and dignity rather than submit to her abjectly.
Asked whether the results had resurrected the party in Bengal, state Congress working president Pradip Bhattacharya said: “There’s no doubt about it. We were not organisationally strong in most of the districts. To add to that, because of the alliance break-up, we had to combat both the Left and Trinamul and our workers did that well. The poll outcome shows that the Congress has become a political factor in south Bengal, which is Mamata’s turf. So, Trinamul will have to depend on us now.”
However, the Congress in Bengal faces two problems.
First, the absence of acceptable mass leaders as witnessed during the civic poll campaign. Union finance minister Mukherjee has been the only one to carry the state Congress’s burden and his leadership has clearly paid off.
But Mukherjee is not only in Delhi most of the time but is also more an administrator and a party trouble-shooter than a politician. His involvement in mass politics is also of recent vintage — the first Lok Sabha election he won was in 2004 from Murshidabad’s Jangipur.
Ironically, the second problem is the Congress high command itself.
Bengal Congress leaders have complained that the party’s growth and its fight against the CPM had always been hamstrung by the AICC’s attitude towards the state party.
To add to the party’s woes, in the last three decades when it has been out of power in Bengal, the Congress high command has treated the state party almost as a lost case. Compulsions of national politics and the Congress’s changing equations with the Left were also big factors against the growth of the party.
After Wednesday’s results, state Congress leaders hope that the AICC will do everything needed to strengthen the party as it is trying to do in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh where, too, it has allies.
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