How Congress’ decay is beneficial to Mamata’s ambition to go national

It was the December of 1997. The Congress party, then led by Sitaram Kesri, was on a tailspin. Elections for the 12th Lok Sabha had been called, and it was certain that the Kesri-led Congress was heading for another rout. Mamata Banerjee, then a Congress member, had had her fair share of rough exchanges with Kesri, often accusing him of treating her poorly. In August of that year, Banerjee, ever the mercurial leader, had organised a massive rally in Calcutta even as the Congress was holding its plenary session in the same city. At the rally, Banerjee announced her intention to float the Trinamool Congress, the “real Congress,” she called it. By December, Banerjee had burned her bridges with Kesri completely.

Though Sonia Gandhi had still given no clear signs of taking over the Congress – she had only agreed to campaign for the party, turning down pleas by party colleagues to lead them – she made what was arguably one of her earliest interventions in resolving the party’s internal disputes. After her key aides, Oscar Fernandes (who passed away earlier this month) and V. George had failed to pacify Banerjee, Sonia decided to meet with the Bengal leader personally. Banerjee, a staunch loyalist of the late Rajiv Gandhi, honoured the summons and met Sonia, who urged the Bengal leader to not split the Congress. Banerjee is learnt to have told Sonia that her mind was made up, but, also assured her that she will always have the greatest respect for her and the late Rajiv Gandhi. A few days later, Banerjee registered her Trinamool Congress with the Election Commission.

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Sonia formally took over as Congress president, on March 14, 1998, after the infamous ouster of Kesri. Banerjee by then was her own boss, the chief of the Trinamool Congress, which bagged seven of Bengal’s 42 Lok Sabha seats in its electoral debut. Sonia’s informal debut in resolving her party’s internal feuds had been a disaster, the escalating cost of which must be keeping her awake now – 24 years later, more than ever before.

Cut to the present. As Sonia Gandhi, now interim Congress chief, struggles to keep her electorally waning party relevant in India’s saffron-tinted polity, it is, once again, Banerjee’s exponential political ambitions and mercurial antics that she must confront, besides a litany of other challenges.

The Trinamool Congress’s ambitious plans of expanding its electoral footprint beyond Bengal – not just in neighbouring states with a concentration of Bengali-speaking voters such as Assam and Tripura, but also to faraway Goa – have left the Congress party befuddled. At a time when Sonia is desperately seeking to pivot the Congress as the fulcrum of a federal front of regional parties to stop the BJP’s electoral juggernaut in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, it’s Banerjee who has emerged as her principal challenger.

The poaching of former Mahila Congress chief Sushmita Dev and former Congress MP Abhijit Mukherjee by the Trinamool, the near-certain defection of former Goa chief minister Luizinho Faleiro, coupled with Banerjee’s recurrent sniping at the Congress’s inability to fight the BJP, should give Sonia enough reasons to suspect that the Bengal chief minister wants to displace the Congress as the real swivel of Opposition unity against Narendra Modi’s BJP.

Congress sources say Sonia is, at least for now, keen on being magnanimous towards Banerjee, even if the Trinamool goes on a pan India shopping spree of Congress leaders. Sonia did not let Dev’s ‘betrayal’ thwart Congress’s invite to Mamata for the virtual meeting of Opposition leaders that she had convened on August 20 – days after the former MP from Silchar joined the Trinamool. Similarly, though the party’s Bengal unit has adopted a blow hot-blow cold attitude towards the Trinamool, the Congress’s central leaders have avoided any strident criticism of Banerjee poaching their colleagues or even taking potshots at the high command.

The reasons for the Congress central leadership’s generosity towards Banerjee, however, don’t stem from the Sonia-Banerjee camaraderie alone. “After her victory in Bengal, Banerjee is expectedly on a high. It is only natural that when the question of leading an anti-BJP national coalition is still open, Banerjee would want to use the current buoyancy in her fortunes to her advantage. To emerge as a serious contender for the job, she needs to expand the Trinamool’s footprint to a level where her party can hope to win 50-plus seats in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, something she can’t achieve by remaining confined to Bengal,” said a senior Congress leader. The leader added, “for the Trinamool, the Congress is a natural catchment area because of ideological similarities and a common adversary, and since we, as a party, still don’t have that one big electoral win to infuse confidence among potential allies in our leadership.”

With Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Punjab, Goa and Manipur going to polls early next year and assembly polls due in Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh towards the end of 2022, the Congress is hoping for some reversal in its dwindling electoral fortunes. Despite the unmitigated disaster that the high command – Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, in particular – has wreaked in Punjab, the party believes that it can still retain the northern state. Despite all present signs to the contrary, the Congress also seems to think that, with a huge dose of elusive luck, it can also wrest Uttarakhand, Goa (where the Trinamool is threatening to be a spoiler) and Himachal from the BJP. Confidantes of the Gandhis believe that even a handful of successive assembly poll victories, irrespective of the size of the states, would place the Congress on a similar high as the one that the TMC is on presently.

“In politics, the only thing that matters is your capacity to win elections. There are nearly a dozen assembly polls due before the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, and if the Congress can return to a winning trajectory with these polls, the faith of the electorate, as well as several of our potential allies in our capacity to take on the BJP will also be restored,” said another Congress leader.

Rahul and Priyanka, both disruptive in their supposed plans of rebuilding the party, as can be gauged from the Punjab mess, have, so far, failed to give a clear glide path to the party – electorally, organisationally or ideologically. The Gandhi siblings also seem keen to dismantle Sonia’s status quo-ist approach of handling the party’s internal matters, something that allowed her time to build consensus and soothe frayed nerves, often to the disgust of observers who saw this as a sign of Congress’s suicidal inertia. That the handling of the party’s affairs by Rahul and Priyanka hasn’t enthused party members about a possible electoral turnaround has been evident for some time now.

Past, current and potential regional allies of the Congress are equally frustrated with carrying the atrophying Grand Old Party through crippling electoral battles in Bihar, Maharashtra, Jharkhand, Tamil Nadu and other states. In states where the Congress is in a direct bipolar fight against the BJP – Rajasthan, MP, Gujarat, Chhattisgarh, Uttarakhand, Himachal, et al – and which collectively pit the two parties against each other on a little over 200 Lok Sabha seats, the Grand Old Party has shown no stomach for a sustained electoral offensive.

Banerjee, on the other hand, is presently showing the resolve to break out of her electoral fief of Bengal – something other regional entities like the DMK, TRS, YSR Congress, BJD or even outfits with a marginally wider electoral footprint like the SP, BSP, NCP – are yet to show with a sense of conviction. The only other regional parties who are attempting an expansion are Arvind Kejriwal’s AAP and Asaduddin Owaisi’s AIMIM, but these efforts and the politics pursued by these leaders have often ended up giving the BJP a clear advantage.

In Banerjee’s view, the Congress’s attempt of forging a broad federal front seems to be an exercise in futility because the Grand Old Party has simply lost the heft it once commanded, and Sonia’s presumed ambition of pushing Rahul as one leading such a coalition has not received wide – or even narrow – acceptance among regional satraps (or within the Congress, for that matter). The Trinamool supremo clearly sees these changing contours as beneficial to her ambition.

Also read: Time for ‘immediate leadership change’ in Congress, says Shashi Tharoor

Sonia, for now, doesn’t wish to risk her Opposition unity project due to skirmishes with the Trinamool. With the Gandhis trying to work out a plan for the induction of political strategist Prashant Kishor – he is also simultaneously drawing Mamata’s expansion blueprint, a clear conflict of interest between the Congress and the TMC but one that Sonia seems willing ignore for the moment – into their party, Congress leaders hope that the current schism in Congress-Trinamool ties will eventually heal. But Sonia must know from past experience of dealing with Banerjee that personal ambition always trumps personal rapport in politics.