Desperate times!

Prashant Kishor challenged the BJP that it would struggle to cross two-digit numbers, amid criticisms from many leaders of TMC, which had appointed him to strategize their win in the forthcoming Assembly elections. The yelling out is rather unconventional for PK, who works stealthily and with his team of thousands of professionals spread out in the target zones.

PK was in response to Union Home Minister’s conviction of a win by 200 seats. Shah was in a mood of elation with the crowd surge at the recently held roadshows at Birbhum. Equations suddenly seem to change with a few recalcitrant and panicked cadres took to raining bricks on the convoy of Nadda during his recent well-calibrated visit to Diamond Harbour, the constituency of Abhishek Banerjee. 

It was the peak of left rule during the seventies. I recall Dilip Chakravorty contested with a Bharatiya Lok Dal ticket in Kolkata Dakshin constituency and had no chances of winning. He was beaten on his head by his political opponents. Undeterred, he campaigned with a huge bandage on his head. He won and became the member of the sixth Lok Sabha 1977-80. Later, when I nudged him at his office near Purna Cinema, he admitted that such incidences do work magically with the ever-emotional electorate. 

Attack on Nadda was no different like the mysterious breaking of Vidya Sagar’s statue, just before the Kolkata phase of last assembly elections. Didi jumped cashing on the hurt to Bengal’s pride from the ignorant outsiders. Kolkatans were aghast, and chose not to disbelieve their grieving leader, despite the evidence from the CCTVs went bafflingly missing. In the case of Nadda, the attacks were on every TV channel. Surely, the BJP party has become wiser, not to leave anything in doubt. The urban middle-class bhadroloks, gentry, of Kolkata, are upset. The inhospitality is not reflective of the Bengali ethos.

The survival of the once invincible TMC citadel is under threat, and the party is left only with menials on the talk shows and debates on the TV channels, who use their decibel power to shout down the opponents with nonsensical gibberish. Everyone believes that it is finally Didi alone who could save the situation. She resurrected her party in 2016, after the vicious Narada sting when the world had written her and TMC off. Can she repeat the feat now? The answer is perhaps yes.

Mamata became a national name after an attack on her in South Kolkata in 1990. It propelled her political fortunes. I would not be surprised if Didi, for the sake of her party forsakes a few controversial figures from her party and pleads before her citizens with folded hands to forgive for any lapses.  That would be a Brahmastra, which could melt the minds of the sympathetic Bengalis. 

The job for PK is to harp on Mamata’s non-involvement in the various acts of omission and commission by a few of her party members, who had derailed her rule. PK, I guess is already on with isolating and insulating the party supremo, like in the case of Cut money return. 

As an observer of elections over fifty years, 2021 battle could be one of a do-or-die for the regional party, which aspired once to storm the other states. Similar to the second wave of a more-vicious Covid strain affecting many countries, the second wave of desertion, on the cards is not far away, some names mentioned aloud in the corridors of power.

It is and will always be Mamata is TMC! That is good and bad!

Sampath Kumar

Intrépide Voix