In April-May 1996, elections were held in India. Nationally, 1996 may be the most significant for being the first election in which the BJP won more seats than the Congress. In West Bengal, the BJP contested more assembly seats than any other party, but electorally, it was peripheral. State politics was bipolar: Left Front (led by CPI(M)) vs Congress.
In 1996, the Left Front and Congress combined for over 88% of West Bengal’s votes, and 288 of its 294 assembly seats. During the campaign, long-time Chief Minister of the Left Front, Jyoti Basu asked voters to stay home if they were unhappy with this government instead of voting for the Congress.
25 years later, the rivals of 1996 were coalition partners. In 2021, the voters of West Bengal elected for the third time in a row a party that did not formally exist in 1996. The Left Front and Congress voted jointly for over 8% of the vote. They won 288 fewer seats than in 1996, that is, zero. The only coalition partner to win a seat was Abbas Siddiqui’s newly formed Indian Secular Front, and was soon publicly rejected by the Congress. The heroes of 1996 were as irrelevant in 2021 as the BJP was 25 years ago.
This story is important partly because it shows that party systems are essentially accidental in democratic politics. In 1996, West Bengal appeared to be one of the most stable political orders in India. No sane person could have predicted its eclipse. But it’s also important because of the identities of the characters – and the person who assumed them both.
From Goa to Meghalaya, from Haryana to Assam, Mamata Banerjee has been making Congress politicians her prey. With only a few exceptions so far, the people hunted are either insignificant or on top of the hill. Neither of them is as likely to form or topple the state government as Himanta Biswa Sarma or Jyotiraditya Scindia. But Banerjee and her mentor Prashant Kishor (“PK”) are accused of disloyalty to the anti-BJP cause, for not knowing their place, being the BJP’s B-team.
The last of these is too absurd to merit rebuttal. Yes, she did meet Gautam Adani, but nexus capitalism in general and proximity to mining interests in particular are issues that divide, not divide, the BJP and Congress. To Banerjee, the other allegations will be particularly familiar. They show the continuing inability of the Congress and the Left to learn from their experience of the past 25 years. They are unable to take Mamata Banerjee seriously.
There are many reasons behind the decline of the Left in Bengal and the Congress at the national level. But there is a culture of equal rights and sclerosis for both, perhaps the inevitable result of uninterrupted decades in power. It was this sense of entitlement that gave Banerjee her start in Bengal, and it is no coincidence that her first expansionist moves are at the expense of the Congress (in Goa and Meghalaya) and the CPI(M) (in Tripura).
For those who believe that the future of the republic depends on an opposition capable of defeating the BJP in 2024, Banerjee’s recent move raises many questions. Is he a plausible and/or deserving candidate to lead that opposition? Is she not hurting the unity of the opposition by raising the head of the Congress? Is Congress a necessary component of any viable opposition?
One can fully accept the scale of Banerjee’s personal and political gifts – above all, courage and tirelessness – while her candidacy for national leadership is in doubt. His MPs may understand the constitutional values on the floor of Parliament, but in West Bengal, he and his party have broken many of their own state’s worst traditions (ranging from violent intimidation to institutionalized occupation) tragically for many Indians. combined with normal. State (the suppression of civil liberties, the cult of personality, and nepotism, etymologically in favor of one’s nephew).
She cannot but point to the record of remarkable achievement as an administrator. Nor, so far, is there any evidence of his political appeal translating to outside West Bengal, neither to voters or leaders of other regional parties.
The case of Mamata Banerjee is as follows. The present BJP is a potential threat to the republic on two major fronts. The first thing is whether India’s 200 million Muslims will be allowed to live as equal citizens in law along with social and political behavior, whether the constitutional vision of India as a home for all will survive. The second is an acute version of the threat posed by Indira Gandhi in the 1970s: to paralyze republican institutions by identifying a republic with an individual.
Hardly any contemporary politician has fought Hindutva with as much success as Banerjee. Unlike the vast majority of his opposition peers – including the current Congress leadership – he himself led CAA/NRC rallies. Even though this was his only merit, it could not be ruled out. On the second point, Banerjee is on weak ground. The only counter it can offer to her record of authoritarian Caesarism is that she could not act as head of the coalition in Delhi, as she does in Kolkata.
Should the Congress lead that alliance as before? When the Prime Minister announced the withdrawal of his three agricultural laws, Rahul Gandhi was aptly praised for predicting their repeal. This is not the first time that Gandhi has been proved right on an issue of national importance. He was one of the first politicians in India to indicate the seriousness of the pandemic.
But Gandhi is auditioning not for Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s job, but for Narendra Modi’s job. In this light, the main thing is not the foresight he has displayed as a political commentator, but his and his party’s failure to appeal to voters. He predicted the repeal of the agricultural law laws, but he played no part in it.
A Congress that has consistently won less than 10% of Lok Sabha seats, and which has 10% of India’s chief ministers, cannot lay claim to an opposition leadership. At the state level, the Congress has been inclined to play the role of a junior partner, including in states where it has historically been the dominant party (Maharashtra, Karnataka), in its short-term quest to negate the BJP’s power. In Kerala, the central leadership has tacitly agreed to an arrangement in which the Congress does not contest state elections as vigorously, and in turn wins a credible majority of Lok Sabha seats.
In practice, the Congress leadership of the opposition means the Gandhi leadership, which means a contest as to who is allowed to define Narendra Modi and a liberal media as the presidency. This means that a competition has already run twice in this country. Those who think that it will be different for the third or fourth or fifth time are confusing the country that they think they should stay with the country they actually belong to.
On a plausible reading of Banerjee and Kishor’s strategy, they do not care about opposition unity, or the threat to the republic posed by BJP hegemony. Like the Aam Aadmi Party, they see that the Congress is giving up the political space and there is no reason why they should not claim it. On the other – more applicable to Kishor than Banerjee – these are attempts to force change in the Congress, or to force the country to move from a “BJP versus Congress” paradigm. Either way, in a democracy in which no individual or party is entitled to leadership, and Congress is unwilling or unable to lead, what are they really to blame? ambition. Accusing a politician of ambition is like accusing a giraffe of having a long neck.
Whether we should pay attention to the identity of the prime ministerial candidate of the opposition is another matter. The BJP benefits from conducting the presidential election asymmetrically. The prime minister benefits from his ubiquity. The opposition’s best chance is in a coalition as close as possible, one that includes the Congress, but is not necessarily led by it. Mamata Banerjee may or may not be fit to lead it – but don’t blame her for trying.
(Keshav Guha is the author of literary and political journalism and the author of Accidental Magic.)
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