The last week of November was notable for TMC chief Mamta Bannerjee’s ill-advised Lady Macbeth act. It began with a three-day trip to Delhi, in course of which she met both Prime Minister Modi and the BJP’s perennial albatross Subramanian Swamy, among others.
Swamy, who in October was unceremoniously dropped from the BJP’s national executive committee, made all the appropriate noises of support for the West Bengal leader, even telling the media that he was “always with her (Mamta)”. The media made much of this, but none of it was surprising — frustrated ambition has governed Swamy’s political career, as I had argued at length in a piece dating as far back as 1998.
She managed to poach Kirti Azad, the “firebrand” BJP politico who quit that party and joined the Congress in February 2019, and has now jumped ship to the TMC, as also former Haryana Congress chief Ashok Tanwar. She is, the Delhi media breathlessly reported, in touch with various members of the “G-23”, the group of Congress rebels-without-a-cause. And even before she landed in Bombay for the second leg of her personal Ashwamedha Yatra, she made her intention clear: To displace the Congress and put herself at the head of the combined Opposition.
(A tangential aside on the G-23: The group of Congress leaders say they have an agenda, to wit, inner-party democracy. They want internal elections, they say. The post of party president is not a heirloom to be handed down from mother to son, they argue. All of which is unexceptional — but then, what stops one of them from putting his hand up and saying that he, or she, wants to contest for the post? The answer is simple, and two-fold: None of the G-23 leaders have any kind of mass base at the all-India level, and they know it and, two, none of them trusts any of the others, and therefore will not support any single G-23 leader’s bid to be top dog).
But back to Banerjee, who while in Bombay borrowed a leaf from the Modi playbook and lined up Bollywood’s liberal icons — Swara Bhasker, Mahesh Bhatt, Javed Akhtar et al — to headline a “gala” that also featured activists such as Medha Patkar, editors of various media outlets, and a liberal sprinkling of celebrities.
The problem for Banerjee is that she is at her core an authoritarian, as intolerant of criticism as Modi himself. It is easy for Modi to line up tame Bollywood celebs who will fawn on cue; the “liberal” (in quotes, because no one seems to know quite what being a liberal means these days) side of the spectrum however is by nature unruly, prone to asking inconvenient questions and testing an authoritarian’s patience. By all accounts, the gala didn’t go quite as well as Banerjee had hoped; it did not produce the ringing endorsements she had anticipated as prelude to her meetings with Opposition leaders Sharad Pawar and Uddhav Thackeray.
The meetings with proved to be the converse of what she had hoped for. She made her pitch, and got told off. Very politely, by Pawar and Thackeray, but far more forcefully — and in an orchestrated fashion — by the likes of Nawab Malik of the NCP and Sanjay Raut of the Shiv Sena, both of whom pointedly proclaimed that there could be no Opposition unity without the Congress in the tent. Their statements were followed by a stinging editorial in the Sena mouthpiece Saamna, which said that creating an alternative to the UPA — an entity Banerjee had dismissed as non-existent in the run-up to her meeting — would in fact strengthen the BJP and “fascist forces”.
“It is understandable,” the editorial said, “that (PM Narendra) Modi and his BJP feel that Congress should be wiped out. This is part of their agenda. But the most dangerous threat is that even those who are fighting against Modi and his ideologies think that Congress should be wiped out.”
Coming from Saamna, the official voice of the Thackeray clan, that is about as brutal as snubs get. And by way of rubbing it in, the Sena announced that Sanjay Raut will meet with Rahul Gandhi in Delhi this week. “Just routine,” the Sena said of the meeting — but the fact that a “routine” meeting was officially announced, and the timing of that announcement, indicates that the Sena is intent on driving its point home.
That is pretty much that as far as Banerjee’s attempt to make a run for pole position in an anti-BJP coalition goes. All that she has managed to accomplish is to showcase her ambition — and by doing so, create distrust in the very leaders whose support she needs.
The question is, why? What prompted her to make this hurried move? And if she did have such ambitions, why did she not do the obvious: reach out discreetly, behind the scenes, to major regional leaders to gauge their support before going public with her ambitions? The answer, quite simply, is thwarted ambition — of political strategist mercenary Prashant Kishor.
Back in July of this year, Kishor met with Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi to propose an action plan to revive the party in preparation for the 2024 General Elections. The series of meetings generated much media ink — a lot of it owing to “sources close to” Kishor himself.
For all the hype, the proposal was Electoral Politics 101: Setting up and strengthening the ground game, beefing up and empowering district- and state-level committees etc. In other words, the bare minimum any political party needs to do in the run-up to an election.
The party’s working committee, splitting itself into various groups, discussed the proposal threadbare, as did the G-23. (In passing, it is interesting that for a party slammed, even by its own, as being run by the family in undemocratic fashion, the outcome was the result of the broadest possible discussions.) Finally, the consensus was to kick the can up the road rather than rile Kishor with an outright refusal.
In public, the party said the Kishor proposal was on hold until after the Assembly elections to five states in early 2022. What was left unvoiced was the sticking point in the Kishor proposal: That the whole effort would be run by an empowered committee, which he would lead and whose members would be hand-picked by him. To this end, he wanted not merely to join the party, but to be given a high-level organisational post, at about the vice-presidential or general secretary level.
Kishor had already cleared the decks by announcing in the aftermath of the 2021 Assembly elections that he was quitting the political strategy space, and acting coy about what his next gig would be. As the internal deliberations within the Congress dragged on, Kishor ramped up the pressure by whispering sweet-somethings into the receptive ears of various media outlets. A report — one of several from that time — cited “a source close to Prashant Kishor” as saying that any association with the Congress would depend on whether he would be given a free hand to take decisions.
Handing over the keys of the party — which is what the Kishor proposal would amount to — stuck in the craw of Congress leaders who pointed out that Kishor was a political mercenary without any ideology of his own, which opened up the possibility that he would jump ship when it suited him. Rather than nix the proposal outright, the CWC decided to put it on ice.
Kishor got the message — that there was no likelihood of a red carpet welcome and a carte blanche to run the show. He promptly forgot his resolution to quit the political strategist space and sold Mamta Banerjee on a new project: world domination. According to his formula, the TMC would expand its footprint into neighbouring states. A report suggested that Meghalaya, which goes to polls in 2023, was one possibility, and Karnataka, also due for elections in 2023, another. Kishor personally piloted the foray into Meghalaya, getting 12 Congress MLAs to jump ship and join the TMC.
The TMC also announced that it would contest the Goa Assembly elections of 2022. Kishor personally engineered the headline-grabbing defection of former Congress chief minister Luizinho Faleiro and a handful of lesser leaders. Though the media buzzed with the possibility of more defections, Kishor’s outreach has thus far fallen on stony ground, thanks to the Congress belief that it has a good shot at toppling the BJP in 2022.
The centrepiece of Kishor’s project was that the TMC would shed its Bengal-centric identity, rebrand itself as a serious national player, and position Mamta Banerjee as the obvious challenger to Narendra Modi in 2024. Full of adrenalin following the defections in Meghalaya and in Goa, Kishor figured the time was right for Banerjee to make her big push.
He flagged her off, she worked up a head of steam — and the project overshot the rails, as anyone who is not a “political strategist” could have predicted.
Neither Kishor nor Banerjee read the realpolitik of regional parties right. The calculation is based on two considerations, the first of which is that the Congress still retains considerable equity in states such as Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Chattisgarh, and in Rajasthan and Punjab where it is in power. The Opposition calculus is that backing the Congress in those states will yield dividends; meanwhile, the regional satraps will lead the fight in their respective fiefdoms with the Congress as junior partner (Tamil Nadu is an example), and sort out the question of who leads the UPA once all results are in.
The second consideration is likely the more important one: For the combined Opposition, Rahul Gandhi is a useful stalking horse. The BJP has an unhealthy obsession with the Congress leader — an obsession visible in the way the various ministers and spokespersons relentlessly target Gandhi at the slightest pretext, or none at all.
The Opposition finds this BJP preoccupation useful — Rahul Gandhi draws the BJP fire, leaving the regional leaders free to fly under the radar and to strengthen their hold on their respective fiefs. And that is why the likes of Uddhav Thackeray and Sharad Pawar in Maharashtra, MK Stalin in Tamil Nadu etc rebuffed Banerjee’s bid to be the Opposition figurehead.
Even K Chandrashekhar Rao of the Telangana Rashtra Samithi has been taking baby steps towards a rapprochement with the Congress. Rao’s change of tack from bitter foe to maybe-friend stems from the realisation that while he was engaged in war with the Congress, the BJP has been making steady inroads into his turf.
Both Banerjee and Kishor have continued to snipe at the Congress in general and Rahul Gandhi in particular after the abortive bid for pole position in the Opposition ranks — but their jibes smack increasingly of disappointment, while various Opposition leaders continue to signal their preference for the Congress. The whole episode has taken on the feel of political theatre. Macbeth, for choice.
I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself
And falls on th’ other
Banerjee, with Kishor applying the spur, fell on the other, was rebuffed, and fell flat on her face. Fini.
Tailpiece: I wrote a piece on the BCCI’s various shenanigans, involving conflict of interest, the effective neutering of the Supreme Court-mandated post of ombudsman, and the smoke and mirrors game involving the pay scales of domestic cricketers. Read it here.
Postscript, at 07.00 PM: Just listened to Goa Forward Party MLA Vijai Sardesai speaking to Barkha Dutt. In light of what I’ve written above with regard to Prashant Kishor, listen:
Kishor’s ambition to play kingmaker — I mean, how does he get to offer chief ministerships? — will be the ruin of whichever party or group he offers his services to.
