Trinamools big tent

If you are bringing in change,then better make it perspicuous,in-your-face,attention-grabbing. And if you are a rather young,13-year-old party that wants to end an uninterrupted reign of 34 years,as Mamata Banerjees Trinamool tries to do to the Left Front in West Bengal in the coming assembly polls,then it also helps to create your own colourful dramatis personae people who seem to mirror a new order,personalities who have absorbing back stories to capture the imagination of the electorate and offset the organisations own lack of a long glorious past. Mamata has got that part right,as she expands her clique of an already interesting bunch of actors,doctors and lawyers to include former IPS officers,playwrights,possibly a former chief secretary who was the trusted aide of Jyoti Basu,and even FICCI guru Amit Mitra and Hotmail co-founder Sabeer Bhatia.

Like with many things,here too,Mamata has borrowed liberally from the Lefts book to create a coterie of intelligentsia,a group that could be projected as her singular slice of sonar bangla. It was actually Singur and Nandigram that made her realise the value of a celebrated circle,of becoming their focal point and of the electoral cache that comes with it. The proof,as everyone knows now,was in the 2009 Lok Sabha polls when her motley bunch won 19 of 42 seats in the state. In this short but so far successful experiment,Mamata has not exactly made the cadre of professional politicians dispensable. But by drawing in people from other walks of life,allowing them lateral entry as candidates and into the Trinamool core group,shes opening up the political space,especially of Bengal,which has been marked by the Lefts notions of indisputable hierarchy.

Yet,it may not be a smooth ride. Its not easy to unify a group that is mostly held together by the tenuous idea of change a point which the Kabir Suman episode brought home forcefully compared to a cadre that is brought up on both discipline and party programme. That could be one of the challenges facing Mamata post-polls. But,for now,she has carved out an exciting new space for rank amateurs in Indian politics. That,in itself,may well be a claim to change.