New Delhi: A meeting between the Congress high command and the party’s West Bengal unit Wednesday saw Mallikarjun Kharge and Rahul Gandhi instructing the state leadership to fight not only the BJP but also the Mamata Banerjee-led TMC, further narrowing the possibility of a tie-up between the two parties in the assembly elections due next year.
At the meeting held in Delhi, Kharge, who is the Congress president, and Gandhi, Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, spent nearly three hours with top leaders of the West Bengal unit including state chief Subhankar Sarkar, former PCC head Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, Deepa Dasmunshi, and AICC state in-charge Ghulam Ahmad Mir, among others.
Sources told ThePrint that the meeting witnessed a few tense moments when Kharge and Gandhi snubbed some senior leaders of the state over their “lack of understanding” of West Bengal’s society and politics.
They were also asked not to turn the meeting into a forum to discuss personal gripes and instead focus on strengthening the party.
Chowdhury is said to have requested the high command to ensure that the discussions in the meeting are not divulged, to which Kharge responded, stating that it was incumbent upon the former Baharampur MP to make certain it does not happen. At the meeting, the state leaders sought clarity from Kharge, Gandhi, and AICC general secretary K.C. Venugopal, who was also present, on whether to adopt a more adversarial approach against the TMC, which is technically part of the INDIA bloc of parties opposed to BJP.
“The central leadership made it clear that while the meeting was not about an alliance, the state unit should not show any hesitation in taking on the TMC. The BJP is an ideological rival, but parties such as the TMC have chipped away at the Congress at the state level. Kharge and Gandhi also sought to explain that coordination in Parliament has got nothing to do with electoral alliances,” said a West Bengal Congress leader who did not wish to be named.
In fact, there has been very little coordination among opposition parties in Parliament during the ongoing Budget session.
Not a single meeting of the floor leaders of opposition parties has taken place so far, leaving no scope for developing any strategy to jointly take on the ruling BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in either House. In previous sessions of Parliament, such meetings were held in the chambers of either Kharge, Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, or Gandhi, Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha.
However, the Congress’s electoral debacle in the Haryana and Maharashtra assembly polls, coupled with its combative campaign against the AAP in the Delhi elections, has reset the INDIA bloc dynamics.
In Delhi, in as many as 13 seats, Congress played a role in the AAP’s defeat, as its candidates received more votes than the margins of defeat of the latter against the BJP. This not only ruptured AAP’s ties with Congress, despite the two parties contesting the Lok Sabha polls in an alliance, but also led other INDIA bloc partners to close ranks behind AAP.
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TMC-Congress-Left
West Bengal Congress leaders, sources said, informed the high command that very little differentiates the TMC and the BJP when it comes “to crushing the Opposition” in the state. Gandhi, it is learnt, expressed his dismay upon hearing this and tried to impress upon them the need to remain ideologically committed to overcome such challenges.
Last month, West Bengal CM and TMC supremo Mamata Banerjee had ruled out the possibility of her party fighting the 2026 assembly polls in an alliance. “Trinamool will return to power with a two-third majority in 2026. We do not need anyone’s help. We will fight alone and win alone,” Mamata was quoted as having said by the TMC mouthpiece Jago Bangla.
Speaking days later, TMC national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee did not rule it out, but asserted that if Congress was unwilling to explore seat-sharing, Trinamool was prepared to go alone.
The TMC fought the 2011 West Bengal Assembly polls in an alliance with the Congress, dislodging the Left Front from power after 34 years. However, the alliance fell apart by 2016, when the Congress tied up with the CPM for the first time, winning 44 and 26 seats respectively in the 294-member state assembly, which the TMC swept, winning 211 seats.
In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, the Congress and the Left did not contest together, winning two and zero seats respectively.
Two years later, in the assembly polls, they had a seat-sharing pact again, only to draw a blank. Still, the alliance fought the 2024 Lok Sabha polls together as well, only to be handed a drubbing again, with the Congress managing to score one seat, and the Left zero.
Sources said that there were no discussions in Wednesday’s meeting about forming an alliance with the Left. Among the other issues discussed were the political volatility that the state witnessed in the wake of the RG Kar Medical College and Hospital rape and murder case, and the instability in Bangladesh following the fall of the Sheikh Hasina regime, particularly using it to incite communal tensions in West Bengal.
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)
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