Anwesha Dash, Pune
Following the seat-sharing discussions and conflicts that had started to strain the relationship between West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and the Indian National Congress(INC), the CM has announced that the Trinamool Congress (TMC) party will be snapping ties with I.N.D.I.A bloc headed by INC, and will fight the Lok Sabha elections alone and independent of the opposition bloc.
Leader of Trinamool Congress and Chief Minister of West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee has declared her intentions to fight the upcoming Lok Sabha elections solo. This statement is in clear juxtaposition from the strategy of the opposition alliance known as the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (I.N.D.I.A), of which TMC is a significant member.
As speculations about seat sharing in West Bengal rose, Mamata Banerjee cleared away the doubts by saying, “We will fight alone in Bengal”. She further reiterated that the two parties had not discussed anything about a seat-sharing plan. Banerjee said that even though she is still with the INDIA party, TMC alone will fight and defeat BJP.
These disruptions in the relation were further flamed when Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, a Congress MP from West Bengal and staunch critic of Banerjee, called the CM an “opportunist” and “Dalal”. Chowdhury went as far as to claim that the TMC leader won primarily through the “mercy of Congress”. He also alleged that the breakaway of TMC was a ploy to divide the votes between “Modi and Didi(Mamata Banerjee)”.
While the Congress MP had taken to mud-slinging; the face of INC, Rahul Gandhi tried to placate the situation all the while navigating through his Nyaya Yatra in Assam. Gandhi said “Such comments won’t matter” and stressed the statement that Mamata Banerjee is quite close to him. Banerjee it seems wasn’t convinced with the assurance and broke away from the alliance the very next day.
The West Bengal CM has also said that Rahul Gandhi’s Yatra would be passing through her state as well, but they were not informed about it. Therefore, in the face of BJP’s ever-growing popularity in the nation, INC has lost another one of its key supporters in the east.