Ahead of TMC’s campaign launch today, Mamata stands lonesome, unlike 2019

Thus far, there is no confirmation of any national opposition leader being present at the rally, unlike in 2019. The party has been highlighting its own “national” faces who will be present on the dais to drum up excitement — including Ripun Bora, Sushmita Dev, Mukul Sangma, Lalitesh and Rajesh Tripathi, Kirti Azad, Shatrughan Sinha, Saket Gokhale and its latest new MP, Sagarika Ghose.

In 2019, the TMC had marked its election campaign launch on January 19 in the presence of nearly 20 national-level opposition leaders, including the Aam Aadmi Party’s Arvind Kejriwal, the TDP’s Chandrababu Naidu, the JD(S)’s H D Kumaraswamy and H D Deve Gowda, the National Conference’s Farooq and Omar Abdullah, the Samajwadi Party’s Akhilesh Yadav, the DMK’s M K Stalin, the RJD’s Tejashwi Yadav, along with senior Congress leaders Mallikarjun Kharge and Abhishek Manu Singhvi, who were said to be standing in for then Congress president Rahul Gandhi and his mother Sonia Gandhi.

Buoyed by the endorsement and the seemingly common front by the Opposition, the TMC supremo had declared, “It is the soil of Bengal that has shown the way, even before Independence. West Bengal has always led the way.”

The Lok Sabha election results, however, had come as a shock to the TMC, with the BJP walking away with as many as 18 seats, just 4 behind the TMC’s tally. The Congress had got the remaining 2 seats.

While the TMC had bounced back with a landslide 2021 Assembly poll win, it has been a steady downhill struggle since, with its handling of the Sandeshkhali episode — where allegations range from extortion to sexual abuse by its musclemen — coming too close to the polls for comfort for the party.

The INDIA alliance had offered a spark of hope, if a tiny one in Bengal given the TMC’s bitter rivalry with the Left in the state. But that has also been snuffed out now due to Mamata herself ruling it out over the Congress’s dalliance with the Left. Other regional parties are hardly likely to court the TMC in such a scenario, cognisant of how the BJP could spin their association with the “scam-tainted” TMC.

A senior TMC leader admitted, “The last Lok Sabha elections were different. Then, we were not fighting corruption allegations, nor had any Sandeshkhali-type incident happened. Right now, we’re politically on the defensive.”

On whether an alliance with the Congress should have been thrashed out, the leader said: “We have realised that on the seats where the Congress won’t contest, their supporters are unlikely to vote for us. So, why make an alliance with the Congress in Bengal, where we and not they are the main opposition against the BJP?”

State Finance Minister and Mahila TMC president Chandrima Bhattacharya said, “Mamata Banerjee has already announced that we will go it alone. We’re strong enough to defeat the BJP in Bengal. From Sunday onwards, you will see Bengal roar at the BJP.”

Asked about the TMC’s Sunday rally, state opposition leaders dismissed Mamata’s “garjana (declaration)”. BJP leader Samik Bhattacharya said, “She doesn’t have an alliance. The INDIA bloc was net practice; it won’t mature into a real game. The rest is media gossip.”

CPI(M) leader Sujan Chakraborty said, “We don’t know what rally the TMC is organising. All I can say is that the police and BDOs have been entrusted with filling the ground for the rally.”