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It’s musical chairs for the three ‘M’s
Subir Bhaumik
Subir Bhaumik
PHOTO : TIWN
Manik Sarkar has told the Telegraph that it would have been great to meet Mamata Banerjee in Delhi at the meeting of the Chief Ministers. “ If she was there, it would have been great to meet her,†the Tripura Chief Minister said on his way back from PM Narendra Modi’s first meeting with chief minister after he decided to abolish the Planning Commission and replace it with a new institution.
Both Mamata Banerjee and Manik Sarkar had opposed the abolition of the Planning Commissio and both had supported Arvind Kejriwal in the Delhi state polls . There was clearly some common ground -- fear of BJP and Modi -- that could explain this sudden desire for meeting with someone who ousted his party from Bengal.
For Mamata, if she can serve fish fry and lecture the likes of Biman Bose to join hands to fight BJP, she can surely meet Manik Sarkar.
The question that many would ask hereafter is whether we are witnessing the beginning of some efforts to forge a secular alliance to combat the rise of the BJP and the common threat that it poses to Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal and Manik Sarkar in Tripura. A question of whether the BIG M in Delhi is threatening the two Ms of Bengal and Tripura and possibly bringing them together.
But what is holding up a formal meeting between the two chief ministers ! If Manik Sarkar feels it would have been good to meet Mamata, he would well have made some back room efforts to have that done. Evidently , that did not happen. But it is the Tripura chief minister’s habit to drop broad hints at times to test the waters – and letting the Telegraph know ‘ it would have been good to meet Mamata’ is perhaps an indication of that.
Also the CPI(M) in West Bengal may not yet be ready to allow for a one-to-one between Sarkar and Banerjee because that may not go down well with party cadres in the line of Trinamul fire – so it was better to have a fruitful meeting at Delhi with the chief ministers gathering providing the perfect cover for testing the waters for a Bengal specific secular front.
But if Manik Sarkar sought a meeting with Mamata in Delhi and that did not happen and if his party is not ready for immediate meetings, why would Sarkar take the trouble of dropping hints of his desire to meet Mamata.
So it could well be a CPI(M) ploy to test waters for a meeting with Mamata. And surely not one that would go the ‘fish fry’ way.
Though leaders like former CM Buddhadev Bhattacharya are strongly opposed to an understanding with Mamata and her party, they are also worried about the steady climb in BJP’s support base in West Bengal. What makes the matter worse for the Communists is that the saffron is essentially replacing the red and eating into the Left support base more than eroding the Trinamul base. That is a threat of imminent irrelevance that the Left needs to address rather quickly.
Manik Sarkar is one of the few CPI(M) leaders known to be hard core political realist in the mould of the late Subhas Chakrabarty with no false claim of intellectualism like some leading the Bengal party. Political survival is uppermost in his agenda and he does not evidently suffer from political untouchability.
Manik Sarkar attending NITI Aayog meeting with North East CMs at New Delhi on Sunday, Feb 8,2015. TIWN
He surely realizes that the BJP steamroller must be stopped in Bengal in the impending 2016 state elections if the saffrons have to be kept away from Tripura.
A grand secular alliance in West Bengal will serve the purpose for all three – CPI(M), Congress and Trinamul Congress. Mamata will get allies when she needs them most to stop the Modi juggernaut and she does not have the advantage that Kejriwal had . The muffler man was in power for only 49 days and came out of it with a reputation unsullied – Didi has been around for more than three years and her image has been torpedoed by Saradha scam and the Burdwan blasts and much else. The Congress makes a point against the BJP and if they get together Mamata, this could be the kind of platform for a nationwide anti-fundamentalist alliance that seems the only way it can bounce back to challenge Modi and BJP.
For the Left -- and this is what Sitaram Yechury is trying to impress on the likes of Prakash Karat – a wider alliance based on secularism will save it from complete national irrelevance that is not possible with Karat’s politics of left unity. Manik Sarkar has generally supported Karat but with the winds of change blowing in the CPI(M) in the run down to the Vijawada party congress this year, he could jolly well change track .
It needs one super-human effort from all three to get together, bury the bitter past and fight the BJP – but that seems to be the only way to keep the saffron steamroller in check and deny them the masnad of Bengal. For Manik Sarkar, an alliance with the Trinamul and the Congress in Bengal will blunt the edge of his own opposition back home.
So for Tripura’s M, Bengal’s M may be a better choice to fight India’s Big M. That , and nothing else, explains Manik Sarkar’s interview to Telegraph and his desire to meet Mamata.
(Mr. Subir Bhaumik is a veteran journalist, former BBC correspondant and author of two well acclaimed books ‘Insurgent Crossfire’ and ‘Troubled Periphery’ )
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