Would the Congress willingly associate itself with Mamata?

Sometimes the people with the best intentions have the worst ideas.

For the last few days - and especially after Mamata Banerjee came to Delhi for an India alliance meeting- there has been a grand liberal re-awakening about the importance of the Congress as a great national alternative to the BJP.

 

The best way ahead, according to many liberals, would be for regional parties to fold themselves into the Congress which is, after all, the mother party for many regional players. A good first step, according to this view, is for Mamata’s Trinamool Congress to merge with the Congress as a sort of homecoming.

 

  I can see the emotional power behind this idea and I understand why it seems appealing as a way of standing up for secularism/ fighting for liberal values/ taking on the BJP/ making India great again (take your pick).

 

   But emotions are not always a substitute for strategy or logic, even. The idea of the streams flowing back to the river that gave birth to them makes for good imagery.

 

   But it also makes for very bad politics.

 

   Let’s take the talk of the return of the TMC. You need to think rationally about the merger for only five minutes to realise why it is a truly terrible idea. Let’s take the reasons why this merger should never happen one by one.

 

   Firstly, the Congress has nothing to gain from Trinamool. Mamata Banerjee has never been more unpopular than she is now. I don’t dispute that the Election Commission contributed to the BJP victory in Bengal but it is now clear judging from the depth of anti Mamata sentiment that Trinamool would have lost anyway.

 

   Why would the Congress not want to start with a clean slate to try and occupy part of the anti BJP space? Why would it willingly associate itself with Mamata’s unpopularity?

 

   Secondly, can any party successfully align with Mamata? Her strength as a leader is her greatest weakness as an ally. She is a power unto herself, who has never been answerable to anyone. When she was in the Congress she fought with everyone. When she aligned with the BJP she fought with everyone there too. And when she returned to an alliance with the Congress her biggest contribution was to break the party’s Bengal unit by urging Congressmen to join the TMC instead.

 

"The only way a non BJP alliance would work is if it functioned like the UPA with each party leader being treated as a member of a cabinet of equals."

   Thirdly, even assuming that Mamata was an amiable person everyone got along with and not a mercurial fighter can you really see a woman who has been the Supreme Leader of her own state for three terms willingly accepting party discipline and listening to the Congress President? About the only person in the Congress that she has any respect for is Sonia Gandhi. And even Sonia had no influence over her in the period when the TMC and Congress aligned. When it comes to the crunch Mamata listens to nobody.

 

   Her presence in the Congress would be a recurring nightmare with weekly tantrums and regular crises. No merger could ever work given Mamata’s personality.

 

   Fourthly, liberals are making a huge mistake by talking about uniting the Muslim vote. It’s exactly this kind of talk that led even liberal Hindus to turn against Mamata and what they saw as a nakedly communally partisan ideology.

 

   Given that Suvendu Adhikari seems incapable of speech unless he is allowed to broadcast a Hindu vs Muslim agenda it is clear that the BJP will further alienate the state’s largest minority in the months ahead. No secular party needs to ‘cultivate’ the Muslim vote. The BJP will push it towards any party that seems capable of defeating the BJP.

 

   The worst thing any party can do is to pursue a pro-Muslim agenda because the moment it does that it will have to answer the obvious question: why is it okay to say you are pro-Muslim when you keep criticising the BJP for saying it is pro Hindu?

 

   Mamata had her own conception of secular politics. That conception has led the TMC to where it is today. It would be a massive mistake for the Congress to abandon it’s more measured and reasonable approach to secularism and to adopt Mamata’s model. Far better to promise good governance with fairness towards all communities rather than to follow her Muslims-are-my-voters strategy.

 

   These arguments are Bengal specific but they apply nationally as well. The Congress has much to gain from alliances with regional players. That was the strategy Sonia Gandhi used to build the UPA and it worked for two terms in government. But most mergers would necessarily fail. Why would a regional satrap who is already the boss of his own party agree to be a Congress PCC chief and listen to Mallikarjun Kharge or Rahul Gandhi?

 

   The only way a non BJP alliance would work is if it functioned like the UPA with each party leader being treated as a member of a cabinet of equals. There is a case for winning back individual Congressmen who feel they were forced out by rivals within the party and by bad decisions made by its leaders (Amarinder Singh, for instance). But let’s be honest. The Congress, as it stands, is no vote winning machine. No regional party has anything to gain from merging with it unless the party in question is down and out and desperate.

 

   That, you could argue, is exactly the state that the TMC is in now. But Mamata Banerjee is smarter than her liberal well wishers. She knows that a merger is not the answer. For Mamata the only way ahead is to return to her roots as a street fighter and win back her popularity. In 1977 when Indira Gandhi was thrown out of the Congress and when her party colleagues abandoned her, she fought a lonely battle to win back the support that the people had once had for her. It wasn’t easy. But she did it.

 

   That’s the only path open to Mamata. And yes, she is no Indira Gandhi but only a fool would ever write her off.