For success of ‘Mission Northeast,’ TMC needs to lose Goa formula, work at grassroots

The mission northeast of the Trinamool Congress runs the risk of meeting the same fate as its Goa sojourn if it continues to bank on poaching disgruntled Congress leaders to build the party organisation.

The party’s strategy in the northeast, where four states – Tripura, Meghalaya, Nagaland and Mizoram – will go to polls next year, is to expand its base at the expense of the Congress, which is facing near extinction in the region it dominated for decades.

Former Assam Pradesh Congress chief Ripun Bora is the latest Congress leader to join the TMC. He dumped the grand-old party barely a fortnight after failing to secure a Rajya Sabha seat for himself from the state as a Congress nominee.

Also read: Centre withdraws AFSPA from parts of Nagaland, Assam, Manipur

Not many in Assam think that it is a great catch considering that Bora is not a mass leader. Moreover, the political career of this Assam Civil Service (ACS) officer-turned politician is smeared in controversy.

He was arrested in Delhi in 2008 for allegedly paying bribe of ₹10 lakh to a CBI official, who was investigating the murder of Daniel Topno, an influential Tea tribe leader. Bora was one of the accused in the murder case.

The timing of his switchover to the TMC also raised questions about his motive.

“Under his leadership, the Congress lost the assembly elections and yet he had been nominated again by the party for the Rajya Sabha seat. Just after his defeat, he switched over to the TMC, hoping that like the other Congress turncoats who had joined Mamata Banerjee’s party, he too would be rewarded with a Rajya Sabha seat,” opined Assam Congress spokesperson Apurba Bhattacharjee.

Six Rajya Sabha seats from Bengal are going to be vacant next year.

Bora is the second prominent Congress leader from Assam to join the TMC. In August last year former Congress MP from Assam’s Silchar constituency Sushmita Dev joined Bengal’s ruling party.

The former All India Mahila Congress president was soon rehabilitated by the TMC with a Rajya Sabha seat from Bengal within a month of her joining the party.

The TMC offered a similar “sinecure” to former Goa chief minister Luizinho Faleiro, whom it had roped in to expand its base in the coastal state. The veteran Congress leader’s switchover to the TMC, had created a buzz in the state for the party ahead of the assembly elections earlier this year. Following in Faleiro’s footsteps, another former Goa chief minister and NCP leader Churchill Alemao, a few other disgruntled Congress leaders and celebrities and civil society activists had jumped into the TMC bandwagon.

The party’s hope to make an electoral mark in Goa merely on the basis of reputation of a few veteran leaders imported from other parties, mainly the Congress was naturally dashed in the elections. In the absence of a grassroots base and alternative agenda, the TMC could not win a single seat in the February elections.

Also read: After ‘gift scam’ of 1980s, Sikkim grapples with ‘tax fraud’

The TMC sources said the party organisation in Goa is in a total shambles now. The party’s Goa chief Kiran Kandolkar said the TMC’s political consultant Prashant Kishor’s I-PAC had abandoned it after the elections.

Many of the politicians and civil society members who had joined the TMC have now either quit the party or recused themselves from party programmes.

Luizinho Faleiro, who has been made the TMC vice president and awarded with a Rajya Sabha berth, is reportedly still unhappy with the party’s strategy. Faleio had backed out of the election contest at the last moment, much to the embarrassment of the party.

The moral of the TMC’s Goa experience is that a few “big names” alone cannot bring electoral success in the absence of proper strategy and programmes.

The party needs to carry the lesson to the northeast, where so far it is following the same Goa model, which political observers say would do more harm to the Congress than expanding the TMC’s base in the region.

“Instead of depending on big names, the TMC needed to focus on building the party organisation from the grassroots just as the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) is doing in Assam by contesting municipal elections,” said senior Guwahati-based lawyer and political commentator Hafiz Rashid Choudhury.

The AAP has put up candidates in 39 of the 60 municipal wards for the forthcoming Guwahati Municipal Corporation elections. Last month, the party won one seat each in Tinsukia and Lakhimpur civic polls, making its electoral presence in Assam.

“We have formed units in all districts of Assam. For the GMC elections, around 160 people had applied for the tickets, out of which we gave nominations to 39,” said AAP’s Assam state coordinator and national council member Bhaben Chowdhury.

In contrast, the TMC did not contest the local body elections.

Apart from Assam, the Bengal-based party is also trying to spread its wings in Tripura and Meghalaya.

Trinamool Congress national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee will be visiting Meghalaya on May 3 to hold an organisation meeting with party state leaders. In the hilly states, the TMC became the main opposition party without contesting elections when 12 of the 17 Congress legislators, including former chief minister Mukul Sangma joined the party in November last year.

“A few of those who joined the TMC might win the elections next year because of their personal popularity. But that will not help the party organisation to grow. In the past, the TMC won a few seats in Manipur and Tripura assembly elections. The party organisation in the two states collapsed once its MLAs deserted it,” pointed out Dipankar Roy, the editor of The Meghalayan, a Shillong-based daily.

Also read: It is time for India’s communist parties to reinvent or perish

He said with a half-hearted approach, the party would only end up splitting the opposition votes.

Tripura is the only state in the region where the party tried to grow organically, launching a slew of street protests against the state’s BJP government ahead of the civic polls last year.

In the civic elections, the party won just one seat in Ambassa Municipality, but it garnered around 24 per cent votes to claim the second position ahead of the CPI(M).

The party’s Tripura campaign, however, lost winds since then. Much to the party’s disappointment, two rebel BJP MLAs Sudip Roy Barman and Ashish Kumar Saha, who had been in touch with the TMC, changed their mind and joined the Congress in February this year.

The duo reportedly did not join the TMC because it did not give leadership assurance to Roy Barman. Barman was reportedly not happy with the way the TMC has been banking on Sushmita Dev, a politician from Assam’s Bengali-dominated Barak Valley, to make its presence felt in Tripura.

Incidentally, it was Sushmita’s father, veteran Congress leader, late Santosh Mohan Dev who is often being held responsible for the party’s electoral decline in Tripura.

The 1988 assembly election was the last time when the party had managed to form a government. But that year the electioneering was marred by pre-poll violence in which more than 100 people were killed.

The CPI(M) blamed the then Union minister and Congress’s Tripura poll in-charge Santosh Mohan for the violence, for which he earned the infamous sobriquet “Santras (terror) Mohan.”

The Congress and the Tripura Upajati Juba Samiti (TUJS) alliance that won 30 out of 60 seats formed a coalition government headed by Sudhir Ranjan Majumdar following the controversial elections.

However, before completing his term, Majumdar resigned in 1992 following differences within the coalition. Samir Ranjan Barman, father of Sudip Roy Barman, took over as the new chief minister, the last from the Congress to head a government in Tripura.

Samir Ranjan Barman was a close associate of Dev. But his son now refused to play second fiddle to Dev’s daughter in the TMC.