When Pinarayi Vijayan took the oath of office as Kerala’s Chief Minister after winning a second successive term in the recent five-state Assembly elections, Mamata Banerjee, West Bengal’s Chief Minister, sent a party colleague to attend the swearing-in ceremony.

It was a significant political gesture, for there is no love lost between their [BB1] two parties.

Mamata Banerjee, founder of the All-India Trinamool Congress (TMC), became Chief Minister in 2011 putting an end to three decades of rule in West Bengal by the Left Front headed by the Communist Party of India (Marxist). In the April elections she won a third successive term, beating back a no-holds-barred campaign by the Bharatiya Janata Party, led personally by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, to oust her.

Contrary to the implied claim in its name, TMC is essentially a regional party of West Bengal. Pinarayi Vijayan is a member of the CPI(M) Politburo. After the loss of West Bengal to TMC and Tripura to BJP, Kerala is the only state where the CPI(M) has a stake in power. Mamata Banerjee’s gesture to Pinarayi Vijayan can be seen as follow-up of an initiative she had taken in the thick of the election battle with the BJP.

In a letter to leaders of more than a dozen national and regional parties, she made a fervent plea to join hands to put an end to assaults on democracy and the federal structure by the BJP and the Modi regime.

Congress President Sonia Gandhi, Nationalist Congress President Sharad Pawar, Samajwadi Party’s Akhilesh Yadav (Uttar Pradesh), Rashtriya Janata Dal’s Tejaswi Yadav (Bihar), Biju Janata Dal’s Naveen Patnaik (Odisha), Dravida Munnetra Kazhakam’s MK Stalin (Tamil Nadu), YSR Congress’s YS Jaganmohan Reddy (Andhra Pradesh) and Telangana Rashtra Samiti’s K Chandrasekhar Rao were among the leaders to whom she wrote.

Her letter referred to some recent Central laws that had abridged the states’ powers and the Modi regime’s use of Governors and Central investigative agencies against non-BJP governments and leaders. She hinted at two possible courses of action. One is concerted action by non-BJP state governments to check the Centre’s moves which are not in the states’ interests. The other is uniting against the BJP and blocking its return to power.

She suggested that after the elections in the five states they should hold talks on working together to save democracy and federalism. CPI(M) General Secretary Sitaram Yechury was not in her list of invitees. The gesture to Pinarayi Vijayan presumably indicates she wants the Left also to come on board. Six weeks have passed since the results of the state elections were announced.  Neither Mamata Banerjee nor any of the leaders to whom she wrote has made any move so far to carry forward the idea outlined in her letter.

An important lesson of the recent Assembly elections is thar Modi and the BJP are not unbeatable. Regional parties with strong bases in states have the capability to stop their advance.

However, one question begs for an answer. Can one-state parties combine effectively and emerge as a Federal Front which can play a constructive role at the Centre?

A close look at the history of Indian elections will reveal that the people want a stable government. In 1979 they voted overwhelmingly for a ramshackle election-eve coalition to take on Indira Gandhi’s Emergency regime. When the new government collapsed quickly, they forgave the sins of the Emergency and voted her back to power. The polarisation of Bengal’s voters between TMC and BJP, resulting in the total elimination of CPI(M) and the Congress from the new Assembly, too, is a pointer in this direction.

The BJP had worked for long to overthrow Mamata Banerjee. The plot got going with Mukul Roy, a co-founder of TMC, defecting to that party five years ago. His presence helped the BJP to make a good show in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. This led to more defections from TMC.

It was the gritty fight which Mamata Banerjee put up that enabled her to save her turf. Within weeks of her sensational election victory Mukil Roy returned to the TMC fold. Other defectors are said to be eager to follow his lead.

By writing to Soniia Gandhi, Mamata Banerjee made it clear that she believes the Congress has a legitimate role to play in the current scenario. But is that party in a fit condition to play its role as the largest opposition party?  

Reverses in the Assembly elections have deepened the Congress party’s existential crisis. It is in a state of continuous decline. To stem the rot, it needs to put its house in order.

First, the Congress must resolve the issue of its leadership. There has been a void at the top since Rahul Gandhi resigned, assuming moral responsibility for the defeat in the 2019 Lok Sabha poll. The crucial question is not who is the party President but what the party stands for. It needs at the helm not one who is willing to appease communal elements by adopting a soft Hindutva line but one who is ready to fight for the constitutional ideals of democracy and secularism, which have taken a beating in recent years. Mamata Banerjee, in her letter, made a pointed reference to the alteration in the status of Jammu and Kashmir. The Congress, which had offered the state a special status and incorporated the relevant provision in the Constitution, failed to put up a strong resistance when the Modi regime scrapped it without consulting the people of J&K or of the rest of India.

How many regional parties are ready to make common cause with the people of J&K who have been deprived of rights they had enjoyed under the Constitution for seven decades?

The parties in the opposition ranks have to do a lot of homework before they can claim to be a distinct, credible alternative to the current dispensation