On talent hunt: Trinamool eyeing states where Congress has weakened

There was a time when the extent of the Trinamool Congress’ (TMC’s) and its leader Mamata Banerjee’s ambition was to win the Gorkha vote in West Bengal. Of the 294 seats in the Assembly, the votes of people of Nepalese origin in the so-called Gorkhaland electorally matter in just three — in and around Darjeeling. Gorkhas of Bengal have been ambivalent to all the national parties because they feel threatened by the 'Bangla-ness' of all political forces in Bengal and fear their distinctive Nepali identity (especially marked by language) would be stamped out.  To protect this, many parties have come up in the region — in the three Assembly constituencies, there are as many parties as there are leaders.

After facing initial pushback, Banerjee decided to lead a campaign ahead of the 2021 Assembly poll to reassure Gorkhas that they face no danger from the TMC. Her appeal — and serious hard work — didn’t work: The BJP won two seats and the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha (GJM) one.

But Banerjee is not giving up. To a khukuri fight, she’s taking along a boti. She accepted an invitation from the ruling party in Nepal, the Nepali Congress, to address their national convention last week. She could not attend in person (the central government dilly-dallied on permission). But even the fact that she was invited shows how seriously the TMC is being taken – both in India and beyond.

The TMCs is contesting the Goa elections — from all accounts, quite seriously. In Meghalaya, it managed to poach 12 of the 17 Congress MLAs overnight, wresting the status of leader of the Opposition from the Congress.  In the inner-party conflict in the Congress, it was the TMC that made its move, stealing Mukul Sangma, a former chief minister who had made no secret of his disappointment when Vincent Pala was made Congress chief in the state. The TMC is making waves in Tripura. Earlier, the chief of the Mahila Congress and former Assam MP, Sushmita Deb, quit the party to join the TMC and soon after, former chief of the Congress' unit in Haryana, Ashok Tanwar, resigned to raise the TMC banner in Haryana.

Earlier this month, Banerjee embarked on a whistle-stop tour to tap leaders of like-minded parties. She called on Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leader Sharad Pawar and spoke with Uddhav Thackeray and Aditya Thackeray of the Shiv Sena as she continued to scout for talent in other political parties, especially the Congress. So from municipal leaders to mid-level party executives to top leadership: Everyone is welcome in the TMC, especially from the Congress, which according to Banerjee, is in the ICU.

Is there a strategy behind all these moves? Is the Trinamool Congress the new Congress? And what will this do to broader Opposition unity?

The TMC is trying to acquire the status of a national party in the legal sense, says one of the world’s most respected authorities on contemporary Indian politics, Gilles Verniers, assistant professor of political science at Ashoka University and co-director of Trivedi Centre for Political Data. The Election Commission recognised it as a national party in 2016 but warned it that it could lose this status after its miserable showing in the 2019 Lok Sabha election. However, once accorded, the status of a national (and state) party continues for 10 years. Earlier this was five years. So the TMC’s national status is safe until 2026. On the other hand, five years in the life of a political party can pass in the blink of an eye.

Vernier sees several trends in the Trinamool’s political expansion: It is happening, he says, only in small states and where the Congress is weak. “You don’t see the Trinamool challenging the Congress in Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh or Gujarat, for example,” he says. “It expands in states where it can either contest elections without excessive costs or it can acquire MLAs from other parties, including the Congress. But this does not amount to the building of a truly national party the way we define the BJP or the Congress.”

Rahul Verma, fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, who has written his PhD on political families, has a slightly different take. “At the moment her primary target is disgruntled leaders of the Congress — in Goa, Meghalaya, and Tripura. Second, the focus is on the northeastern states with some Bengali-speaking populations. This is likely to become the core base of the TMC. Third, many of the states targeted by the TMC will have Assembly elections in 2022 and early 2023,” he says.

But there’s the form — the bells and whistles of a national party, positions, offices to run, and patronage to be doled out. And then there’s the content. The TMC is in direct opposition to the BJP. But how different, ideologically, is the TMC from other Congress look-alikes? And if it isn’t that different from the Congress in terms of thinking, why is it there at all?

Vernier says what makes the TMC different is its claim that it has the formula to defeat the BJP. “The formula is a combination of policy ideas and also an ideological stand against the BJP as a threatening, masculine, and violent political force. And so the campaign that Banerjee led against the BJP was based on policy ideas: Welfare schemes, redistribution, women’s safety and so on; and also the depiction of the BJP as a threatening other — as an outsider political force, an outgrowth of a party from Gujarat. It remains to be seen if this formula can be exported to other states.”

Many who have left the Congress to join the TMC did so out of a sense of frustration because democratic structures in the party were dismantled and replaced by individuals. But is the TMC any different? And if it isn’t, won’t it meet the same fate as the Congress? Verma is not sure about the future. But he says when politicians leave a party to join another, the two reasons that are cited are that their parent party is moving away from the stated ideology or internal democratic structures are getting subverted. “While these may be true in some cases, often politicians defect looking for better electoral career prospects. A growing party like the TMC in this phase of expansion can accommodate those with political ambitions. For example, the TMC nominated Sushmita Deb and Luizinho Falerio to the Rajya Sabha. The Congress at the moment, with all its internal troubles, will seem like a sinking ship for those with such ambitions.”

Both Verniers and Verma believe Banerjee is leading the party as a general in the Army: Choosing to fight only battles she can win because that’s the key to winning the war. For Banerjee and the TMC, the war is not just about being the winner. It is also about being the winner among the losers.