The Panskura verdict

IN WRESTING THE Panskura Lok Sabha seat in West Bengal, Ms. Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool Congress may not have exactly put the ruling Left Front on notice in the context of the Assembly poll which is less than a year away. But there can be little doubt that the sweeping defeat of the CPI nominee, Mr. Gurudas Dasgupta, a seasoned parliamentarian, in the June 5 byelection, is a major setback to the combine, given that the seat had been held by it for over two decades, and its perceived invincibility has received a good knock. In a sense, the Panskura verdict and the outcome of the civic polls held across the State just about a week earlier are at variance with the widely-shared perception that the Left Front is unassailable in the rural constituencies and the Trinamool Congress-BJP alliance's popular base is predominantly urban in character. In the municipal elections, the Left Front did remarkably well and the Congress(I), despite its striking organisational weaknesses, by and large held its ground, much to the chagrin of Ms. Banerjee who had failed to push through her plan for an anti-Left `Grand Alliance', what with her own party turning in a dismal performance. As for Panskura, the Left Front has primarily itself, its internecine squabbles and bickerings at the grassroots level, to blame for its poor showing. In fact, there were early warning signals in the shape of a sharp drop in its victory margin over the last few elections which the Front had obviously ignored. The Left Front, which in any case may have to contend with the handicap of not having Mr. Jyoti Basu as its Chief Ministerial mascot, could be in trouble when facing the Assembly elections if the right lessons are not learnt from the Panskura experience.

One predictable consequence of the Panskura verdict is of course the revival of the campaign for Ms. Banerjee's pet `Mahajot' concept which envisaged the coming together of all the mainstream anti-Left political parties, mainly the Trinamool Congress, the Congress(I) and the BJP. After the civic polls that saw the Congress(I) performing creditably and much better than the Trinamool Congress, the prospects of the Grand Alliance were rated low. But in the post-Panskura context, the pro-`Mahajot' lobby in the Congress(I), among its chief protagonists being Mr. Ghani Khan Choudhury and Mr. Somen Mitra, is bound to push for the tieup vigorously, even if the pitch is unlikely to be queered till after the Calcutta and Salt Lake civic polls are over. Although the Congress(I) high command decided not to join forces with the TC-BJP combine and chose to put up its own candidate in Panskura, tokenism was palpable in its action, with no serious electioneering in evidence and the party's central leadership doing precious little to galvanise its cadres.

In fact, the Congress(I) high command's response to the `Mahajot' idea has been marked by indecision and vacillation from the beginning. First, when the likes of Mr. Ghani Khan Choudhury and Mr. Somen Mitra insisted rather defiantly on a tieup with the Trinamool Congress within an overall grouping that included the BJP, Ms. Sonia Gandhi went along with them, even while party spokesmen were taking a no-truck-with-BJP (either direct or indirect) stand. On Ms. Banerjee refusing to snap ties with the BJP - only the naive would have expected her to break away from the dominant partner of the coalition ruling at the Centre - Ms. Gandhi applied the brakes, rather tentatively and more to buy time, but only to see the `Mahajot' ghost returning to haunt her with greater vigour. It would be in the longer term interests of the Congress(I) not to let the ideological imperatives at the national level be overridden by narrow partisan considerations. Which is to say, there can be absolutely no compromise or equivocation in the matter of aligning with political forces that subscribe to or support communal or sectarian ideologies.

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