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Mamata may get Cabinet berth soon

By Malabika Bhattacharya

Kolkata March 10. The chairperson of the Trinamool Congress, the main Opposition party in the Communist-ruled West Bengal, appears to be staging a comeback after spending the past several months in political wilderness. Reports from Trinamool circles in Kolkata and Delhi suggest that the National Democratic Alliance, led by the Bharatiya Janata Party, has started coming round to the idea of having Mamata Banerjee back in the NDA Government.

Going by the buzz in political circles, the prospects of reinstallation of Ms. Banerjee as Central Minister have brightened following the ``initiative'' taken by the Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, keeping in view the possibility of an early parliamentary election. Mr. Vajpayee, who is said to have a soft corner for Ms. Banerjee has succeeded in rolling back the opposition in the BJP as well as within the NDA to the Trinamool chief whose highly personalised style had won her many foes.

Trinamool and BJP officials indicate that Mr. Vajpayee's initiative is part of an exercise in Cabinet expansion, most probably next month, exclusively in regard to the allies. After suffering the earlier disappointment when Ms. Banerjee was not reinstalled as a Central Minister — the Trinamool is wary of openly discussing the prospect. But its officials in private are optimistic upon learning from the backroom network that Mr. Vajpayee's position that Ms. Banerjee's Trinamool will be needed to give a fight to the Communists in the parliamentary election has gained ground.

It is believed that the Trinamool has also convinced a sizeable anti-Banerjee section of the BJP that the Trinamool supremo could not be pushed to the background any further after her whole-hearted participation in the campaign for NDA candidates in the just-concluded Assembly elections in Nagaland, Meghalaya and Tripura. Those who thought that Ms. Banerjee, a former Congresswoman , still had a line going into the Congress and nursed a desire to get into a poll-time collaboration with Sonia Gandhi needed to change the opinion about her, they argued.

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