A total disregard for the official national opposition umbrella, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), and a call for a “strong alternative” comprising “forces who are willing to fight it out on the field against fascist forces in the country” — this seemed to be the mantra of Trinamool Congress (TMC) supremo Mamata Banerjee, which became evident from her current visit to Mumbai.
“What UPA? There is no UPA anymore. We will sit and decide on how to form a new block,” Banerjee said on Wednesday afternoon with NCP chief Sharad Pawar standing by her side following her meeting with the leader at his south Mumbai bungalow, which lasted for about an hour and 10 minutes. Abhishek Banerjee, Trinamool’s national general secretary, was also present at the meeting.
Mamata’s statement, undoubtedly, would ring a jarring note to the ears of UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi, with whom the West Bengal CM’s political chasm currently looks nearly unbridgeable. The two leaders last met in July this year and vowed for setting up a united opposition to take on the BJP juggernaut in 2024.
Blow to Congress?
Mamata is, however, not just the only person to have given a jolt to the grand old party. Top Congress leaders from Assam, Goa and Meghalaya have also dealt significant blows to the Congress recently by switching sides with the TMC.
The latest to join the bandwagon from Meghalaya was senior leader Mukul Sangma, who even went as far as to call the move a “trendsetter” to be “followed elsewhere in the country”. By jumping the ship, Sangma made the TMC the principal opposition in Meghalaya, snatching it from the Congress. Besides Sangma, 11 other MLAs had followed suit.
End of Mamata-Sonia bonhomie?
Training guns on the Congress, Banerjee told reporters outside Pawar’s residence, “We want to have a united opposition. But we cannot do that with a party which is not willing to fight it out on the field.”
That statement seemed like a follow-up to her oblique remark against top Congress leaders made during an interaction with a section of Mumbai’s civil society members earlier in the day. “If you stay in foreign countries half the time, when will you do politics in India? You should be continuously attached with political activities.”
She also said, “There would be an agenda set for a common minimum programme of opposition parties at the time of general elections. I don’t want to divulge those details since I don’t want our opponents to devise counter-strategies.”
Echoing Mamata’s statement, NCP chief Pawar, “We need a strong opposition in which people of this country can repose their faith. We will follow the path charted by that opposition force, which can actually drive the BJP away from power.”
Interestingly, Pawar’s NCP, with 9 MPs, is still known to be part of the UPA. Unlike, of course, Mamata’s TMC, which severed ties with the UPA-II regime in 2012 over differences on the issue of introducing FDI in retail.
Currently, 19 political parties, national and regional, of which the Congress is the largest in terms of the number of Parliamentary seats, are believed to be constituents of the UPA. Although the alliance has never formally met since the 2019 general elections, which proved to be a disaster for the alliance, its chairperson Sonia Gandhi has hosted dinners in the national capital for the constituent leaders once in a while.
Mamata, however, hasn’t yet been able to cobble up an opposition unity despite her repeated attempts. Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge, the current Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha, was prominently seen standing between Mamata and Pawar at Trinamool Congress’s Brigade Parade Ground grand rally in Kolkata in January 2019, which he attended alongside other UPA and non-UPA parties ahead of the general elections that year.
However, the poor performance of the UPA, which reduced the block to just 91 Lok Sabha seats and Congress to 53 fizzled out any further attempts to forge an opposition unity. It is also evident, at least for now, that Mamata has lost interest in extending an olive branch to Congress. And, in the current context, there is little chance that any such effort would be adequately reciprocated.
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