For the past few weeks,people of Haryana have been getting to hear it on their FM channels. A jingle with Haryanvi and Punjabi versions urges them to stand up to the governments supposedly forcible acquisition of agricultural land. It also ridicules the government for the recent power crisis. And to fight all this,it urges the listeners to join the Trinamool Congress a party whose leader along with her aides sits in Kolkata,some 1,500km away. Election season has not yet set in,either in Haryana or nationally,but Mamata Banerjee has started testing the waters in north India ahead of 2014. Her number two in the party,Railway Minister Mukul Roy,inaugurated the partys north India base office a very swanky one in Chandigarh in June. Punjab has already voted,and UP was a disaster for the Trinamool Congress,which has now sets its sights on Himachal Pradesh too. In Haryana,the task it has set itself will be uphill. The state votes largely in two basic directions,Jat and non-Jat. The Trinamool Congress will first need to upstage Kuldip Bishnois Haryana Janhit Congress,the strongest of the non-Jat parties,which itself remains overshadowed by Jat-dominated parties in most places except Hisar. This is in spite of the Jat vote being divided between Om Prakash Chautalas INLD and the Congress (Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda is a Jat leader). The party has chosen the farmers unrest among land-losers as its opening political plank. After the radio jingles,there is plenty more to come,says Kanwar Deep Singh,industrialist,Trinamool MP in the Rajya Sabha from Jharkhand,and the man in charge of the partys north India mission. Singh,owner of the Rs 10,000-crore Alchemist Group,had incidentally been stopped by income tax officials at Delhi airport in March 2011 after Rs 57 lakh in cash was found in his bag. This was during election season and Singh was headed for Guwahati; Assam was among the states voting. He had then told The Indian Express,The cash belonged to my company; it was well accounted for. The IT department got everything verified,and we were allowed to go. About a fortnight ago,Singh and some party workers reached Gorakhpur in Fatehpur where villagers have been protesting a proposed nuclear plant. Singh gifted cheques of Rs 2 lakh each to the families of three persons who had died in the agitation. He went on to announce that his party would give jobs to members of these bereaved families. Singh says he also addressed farmers in Sonepat. The choice of land acquisition as a platform is not surprising in a state where it is a raging issue and for a party that has exploited it earlier. It was Mamatas role in the farmers protest against the Left Front governments land acquisition for a Tata car factory in Singur,40km from Kolkata,that proved the steppingstone to the Trinamools triumph last year. The farmers cause in Haryana,however, hasnt resulted in numbers yet. A recruitment drive is in progress and Trinamool functionaries say the cadre strength is slowly growing,but little of it is has been visible so far. The only recruit with any prominence has been Sunderpal,Hoodas former media adviser,and even he has never contested an election. The party is aiming high in Himachal Pradesh,too. We will fight in almost all the seats (68) in Himachal Pradesh. And I can assure you,we will win seats too, says Singh. Mamata Banerjee will also come to campaign here. Mamata had failed to visit Uttar Pradesh to campaign for her candidates. The drubbing the party received was offset to an extent when five-time MLA Shyam Sunder Sharma,this time fighting on a Trinamool ticket,won the by-election to Mant Assembly seat near Mathura in June. Otherwise,the only success the party has seen outside of Bengal has been in the Northeast,not the north. It contested 47 seats in Manipur this year and won seven in an election for which Singh again was in charge. The party won around 18 per cent votes in the traditionally Congress stronghold. In a number of seats,our losing margin was around 1,000 only, he says.
