Battle of Awadh & the ruler of Bengal

On March 6, the results of the Uttar Pradesh elections will be known. Watching them closely will be a person whose party has put up a few candidates in the northern state but who otherwise has only a peripheral interest in the Hindi heartland: Mamata Banerjee. The Trinamul Congress leader and West Bengal chief minister is anticipating a poor performance by the Congress in Uttar Pradesh and reckoning this will trigger a chain of events that may lead to an early Lok Sabha election.

What is Ms Banerjee’s best-case scenario for March 6 and why is she praying for it? The UPA government has a precarious majority in Parliament and is very dependent on the Trinamul Congress. If Ms Banerjee walks out of the UPA, the government more or less collapses. The Congress knows it will make only limited advance in Uttar Pradesh but hopes the Samajwadi Party, the front-runner in the election, will need its support to form a government. Logically, the SP — which won 23 seats in the Lok Sabha election in 2009 as opposed to the Trinamul Congress’ 19 — will return the favour in New Delhi and the UPA government will retain its stability.
For Ms Banerjee it would be helpful if either of two things happen on March 6. First, the SP wins enough seats on its own — or with adjustments with minor parties and independents — to not need the Congress. Alternatively, the BSP and the BJP between them win enough seats (about 200) to make a non-BJP, non-BSP government impossible.
Since the BJP is unlikely to tie up with the BSP, this second outcome would inevitably mean President’s Rule in Uttar Pradesh. It would not result in any accretion in the UPA’s numbers in the Lok Sabha, and the SP — or the BSP for that matter — would see no reason to inch closer to the Congress.
What is Ms Banerjee batting for? She wants to be in a position to bring down the UPA government at will and to, in effect, decide the date of the next election. That would require a Trinamul withdrawal from the UPA not compensated by another group of MPs. More than any other regional or national party, it is the Trinamul Congress that sees a benefit in an early election. Its chief rival, the Left Front, is still weak, battered after the defeat in the 2011 Assembly election. Even so, the CPI(M) — which dominates the Left Front — put up a show of strength in the heart of Kolkata earlier this month and organised a 500,000-strong public meeting. This did not necessarily represent a new-found mass popularity; it spoke more of the organisational rigour and cadre resources of the Communists. However, it did signal the end of Ms Banerjee’s honeymoon period, following her big victory in the state elections in the summer of 2011.
Yet Ms Banerjee’s motivation is not just to force a Lok Sabha election before the CPI(M) and its allies can regroup. It could be reasonably argued that the Left would not recover significant ground even if she were to wait till May 2014, and allow UPA-2 to complete a full term.
The more immediate battle Ms Banerjee is waging is against the Congress itself. She is determined to fight the 2014 (or whenever) Lok Sabha election unencumbered by an alliance partner. As it is she has reduced the Congress in West Bengal to a rump entity. Much of the old party has joined the Trinamul Congress. Now she is systematically taking on and undermining the few remaining Congress district-level leaders, such as Adhir Chowdhury (Behrampore, in Murshidabad) and Deepa Das Munshi (Raiganj, in South Dinajpur).
Both these MPs sense the chief minister will work to defeat them in the coming parliamentary election. Especially for Mr Chowdhury, a local strongman who held his own against the CPI(M), this would be cataclysmic. If Ms Banerjee succeeds in effacing Mr Chowdhury, she would more or less have wiped out the Congress from south and central Bengal, with only pockets of influence remaining in the north of the state.
Ms Banerjee’s hostility to the Congress and that she clearly desires a weaker Congress after the next general election has been apparent in the manner in which she has opposed provisions of the Lokpal Bill and now the proposed National Counter-Terrorism Centre. On both occasions, she has cited the principles of federalism, joining hands with the BJP in Parliament in the Lokpal episode and making common cause with non-aligned chief ministers such as Naveen Patnaik and J. Jayalalithaa on the NCTC issue.
Ms Banerjee’s confidants say she is determined to oppose the Congress candidate for Rashtrapati Bhavan when the presidential election takes place in July 2012. Of course the Congress nominee hasn’t even been announced yet.
What is all this leading to? Many wonder if Ms Banerjee is ever going to get a grip on the administration and whether she will effect genuine regime change in West Bengal. On the other hand, will she simply replace Left-backed cussedness and goonda-raj with Trinamul-backed analogues, in some instances with the same faces and individuals switching camps?
While these questions are legitimate the fact is Ms Banerjee’s priority for the medium term is not administrative excellence but establishing hegemony in West Bengal. She believes the low expectations of the people — given the mess the Left had reduced the state to — and the defeatism of the CPI(M) have given her a once-in-lifetime opportunity to embed the Trinamul Congress in the social and power structure of West Bengal. An early election is only a route to this end.
Some may consider this cynical politics and an extremely narrow and decidedly subjective reading of the mandate of 2011. Nevertheless, Ms Banerjee is not the first politician to take recourse to such calculations. This is what makes March 6 and the battle for Awadh so crucial to the plans of the ruler in Kolkata.

The writer can be contacted at malikashok@gmail.com