Mamata Banerjee says she is ready to induct a number of BJP leaders into her party. She went as far as to mention that seven to ten MLAs are already at her door.
The Trinamool chief said that she would allow former TMC MLAs to return “with love, and not out of hate”, sending a message to the national BJP bosses that she was disturbed over what the West Bengal governor was doing and how the CBI has resumed its operation to nab post-poll violence offenders.
Mamata wrote four letters to Prime Minister Modi to call back governor Jagdeep Dhankhar. Two of her MPs even intercepted the president and prime minister in Parliament.
But Modi has not replied to a single letter of the West Bengal chief minister. While President Ramnath Kovind smiled at the TMC MP Sudip Bandyopadhyay, who stood in front of him with folded hands, Modi asked the other TMC MP Saugata Roy to retire from politics.
At the same time, the CBI has begun raiding key locations where people accused in post-poll violence are hiding. The agency has also declared cash awards for information on many absconding TMC leaders.
Moreover, the CBI has also asked TMC leader Anubrata Mandol to present himself for interrogation in connection with the murder of a BJP worker in Birbhum a day after the result was declared in Bengal.
All of this has not gone down well with Mamata, whose party had earlier declared that it would not be interested in the return of former TMC leaders who had joined the BJP.
But there is a huge problem in the BJP as the “stop-gap” president of the party in Bengal, Sukanta Majumdar, does not have full control over the party in the state. Many old leaders of the BJP who have been pushed to a corner have openly vented their anger on general secretary (organisation) Amitava Chakraborty for running a dictatorship in the BJP. Since Chakraborty is an RSS man deputed into the state BJP, the complaint against him has reached Nagpur.
RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat came to Kolkata on January 31 and stayed for a couple of days to interact with senior RSS people in the state. He will return to Bengal in mid-February.
News of the dire state of the BJP in Bengal has reached the ears of Amit Shah and even Prime Minister Modi. Shah had built up the organisation with the help of Dilip Ghosh and Subrata Chattopadhyay, former general secretary organisation and now RSS’s eastern region chief. For Shah, Bengal is an important project.
The problem for him is that under the stewardship of the present dispensation of the part in the state, the BJP has gone into “autopilot mode”, as a senior national BJP leader told THE WEEK. And, Mamata Banerjee is making the most of this situation.
To many, Mamata’s political interventions in different states have so far helped the BJP nationally. But this year, she has said she would help SP’s Akhilesh Yadav oust Yogi Adityanath in Uttar Pradesh. She will not participate in the campaign as she had earlier said.
But, there is no doubt she would like to put pressure on the BJP in Delhi by threatening to poach MLAs as the CBI and ED are active once again. Fence-sitters in the BJP who would be threatened with criminal charges would have to leave the party if the state units are on silent mode and the national leaders remain silent as well.