Deja vu, didi style

It's been a long time since the Vajpayee government has been called upon to exercise its skills in managing sulks and tantrums. Indeed, it...

It8217;s been a long time since the Vajpayee government has been called upon to exercise its skills in managing sulks and tantrums. Indeed, it could claim a rare expertise in this department during the heady days when the AIADMK8217;s Jayalalitha Jairam, as part of the NDA coalition, called the shots from Chennai. Emissaries like Jaswant Singh and George Fernandes would then be told to pick up a placatory bouquet from the florists and rush post-haste to Poes Gardens by catching the earliest flight out. The good gentlemen discharged these duties with considerable, if often ineffectual, aplomb.

The right royal tantrum that the Trinamool Congress leader, Mamata Banerjee, threw on Friday must certainly have left the BJP leadership in Delhi with a powerful sense of deja vu. Not only did the Union minister of Railways clear her files and stay away from office, she let it be known widely that she saw no point in being in the government at the Centre if she was going to be subjected to shabby treatment back home.

The nub of the problem was, of course, that perennially vexatious issue: seat-sharing. While the West Bengal unit of the BJP unilaterally allocated to itself 45 of the 141 seats that are to be contested in the Calcutta civic elections of June 25, the Trinamool Congress lost little time in demonstrating who the boss is by ruling that the BJP deserved only 20 seats, on the basis of its past electoral record.

For the BJP, this is the classic dilemma that coalitional politics routinely throws up. While the growth of the party in West Bengal is crucially dependent on its ability to demonstrate its electoral popularity in the state, the exigencies of Central rule demands a constant reining in of local political ambition. Vajpayee and his colleagues, therefore, lost no time in making placatory noises to their offended West Bengal ally, with Murli Manohar Joshi being given the onerous responsibility of bringing Mamata around.

But this did not prevent the BJP strongman in the state and the present minister of state for telecommunication, Tapan Sikdar, from acidly decrying the lady8217;s 8220;blackmailing tactics8221;.

But the BJP8217;s West Bengal unit was finally forced to see reason and settled for another three seats. Mamata Banerjee does have a point. It is the BJP that is largely redundant in West Bengal politics. It is BJP that is riding on the back of the Trinamool Congress and not the other way round. Indeed, if anyone has the stature in the state to storm the Left citadel, which has existed for over 22 years, it is Mamata Banerjee alone, no matter how important Sikdar believes himself and his party to be. The lady, on her part, has also been very unambiguous about her future trajectory.

Like Jayalalitha before her, her ambition is directed at capturing the state, not in playing an influential role at the Centre. All her moves thus far from deserting the Congress to creating her own party; from supporting the NDA coalition to hammering together a mahajot against the Left Front has been directed to this end. She is unlikely to let anything stand in the way of that ambition, knowing as she does that the civic elections are just a dress rehearsal for the real thing the crucial assembly polls that take place early next year.