Mamata Banerjee calls for opposition unity against BJP

Kolkata: Mamata Banerjee on Saturday urged all political parties opposed to the Bharatiya Janata Party in West Bengal to unite and fight the saffron party, which had a landslide victory against her Trinamool Congress in the just-concluded assembly elections in the state.

The TMC chairperson made the call for unity among the opposition parties in West Bengal on a day her aide-turned-adversary, Suvendu Adhikari, succeeded her as the chief minister of the state. Though she did not resign after the rout of the TMC in the elections, her social media profiles were updated on Saturday, reflecting the end of her 15-year-long tenure at the helm of the state government.

“She is no longer relevant in the politics of West Bengal. I don’t want to comment on the statements made by the irrelevant people,” Adhikari said when journalists asked for his reaction to Mamata’s call for a united opposition against the TMC.

As Adhikari took the oath as the new chief minister of West Bengal at a grandiose ceremony at the Brigade Parade Ground, Mamata presided over a sparsely attended event at her residence at Harish Chatterjee Street in Kalighat to celebrate the 165th birth anniversary of Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore.

“I call upon all opposition parties, including the leftists and the ultra-leftists, to come together to form a joint platform against the BJP,” said the AITC chairperson. “It is not the time to think that the enemy’s enemy is my friend. Our first enemy is the BJP,” she said, apparently reaching out to the Congress, Communist Party of India (Marxist), other leftist parties, and the Indian Secular Front.

The BJP secured 45.84% votes and won 207 of the 294-member state assembly so far. The TMC won 40.80% votes and 80 seats. The Election Commission ordered repolling in a constituency – Falta in South 24 Parganas – in view of the allegations of large-scale irregularities in several booths.

The CPI(M) and the others in the Left Front secured nearly 5% votes. Only the CPI(M) could win a seat. The ISF, too, could win just one.

Mamata on Saturday said that the birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore on Saturday marked the beginning of the TMC’s “new journey”. She hinted that the TMC would soon hit the streets against the state’s BJP government.

“She has no credibility. She cannot lead an anti-BJP front. She enabled the BJP’s rise in West Bengal through opportunistic politics. The communists will continue fighting both the BJP and the TMC in West Bengal,” Sujan Chakraborty, a CPI(M) leader, said, rejecting the call by the TMC chairperson.

Mamata alleged that the BJP’s victory in West Bengal was the result of a conspiracy by the saffron party and the Election Commission, but not a mandate of the people.

She said that she and the party general secretary, Abhishek Banerjee, had received calls from Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi of the Congress, Uddhav Thackeray of the Shiv Sena (UBT), Arvind Kejriwal of the Aam Aadmi Party, Tejaswi Yadav of the Rashtriya Janata Dal, Akhilesh Singh of the Samajwadi Party and the chief minister of Jharkhand, Hemant Soren, who all expressed solidarity.

Mamata recently hosted Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Singh at her residence. Akhilesh said that the BJP had won the recent elections in West Bengal through manipulation and intimidation, just as they had done in Uttar Pradesh in 2022.

Despite the electoral defeat, she did not resign immediately after the results were announced and continued to question the outcome of the polls.

She, however, updated her profiles on X and Facebook, describing herself as: “Founder Chairperson All India Trinamool Congress. Chief Minister of West Bengal (15th, 16th and 17th Vidhan Sabha).”