Mamata-Governor truce fuels speculation about TMC's bid to lower hostility with BJP central leadership

Kolkata: Even as Mamata Banerjee recently positioned herself as a claimant to the leadership of the opposition I.N.D.I.A bloc, a truce between West Bengal chief minister and the state’s Governor C V Ananda Bose further fuelled the speculation about her Trinamool Congress seeking to lower the level of hostility with the Bharatiya Janata Party’s top brass.

Ananda Bose on December 2 went to the state assembly to administer the oath to the six new TMC MLAs, who won the recent bye-elections, without asking them to come to the Raj Bhavan, as he had done in the past triggering a conflict with the Speaker Biman Bandyopadhyay and the ruling party.

A week later, on December 9, Banerjee went to the Raj Bhavan for a meeting with Ananda Bose, although she had just a few months back vowed not to visit the Raj Bhavan ever, in view of an allegation of molestation against the governor.

“It is a 'bhai-behen' (brother-sister) relation between the governor and the chief minister in West Bengal,” Ananda Bose said after the meeting with Banerjee.

“The real friendship is like fluorescence. It shines better when everything has darkened,” he later posted on X. “Even though we may be parted, we remain connected like the branches of a tree that stretch towards each other”, added the governor who had only a few months back accused the TMC supremo of practising “dirty politics”.

Banerjee had also demanded the resignation of Ananda Bose from the office of the governor.

The governor also recently gave his nod to the appointment of vice-chancellors of the 10 universities as recommended by the state government, instead of blocking the process as he had done in the past. This marked a pause, if not an end, to the conflict between the Raj Bhavan and the state government over the functioning of the varsities.

Banerjee’s truce with Ananda Bose came close on the heels of the TMC MPs’ refusal to join their counterparts in the Congress and other I.N.D.I.A. parties in the protest in both houses of Parliament against the alleged links between the BJP and the billionaire industrialist Gautam Adani, who was recently indicted in a US federal court for allegedly conspiring to commit securities and wire fraud. It also coincided with the TMC projecting its supremo as a claimant for the leadership of the I.N.D.I.A.

Ananda Bose was appointed as the governor of West Bengal in November 2022 and his several comments targeting Banerjee and her Trinamool Congress in the past had drawn flak from the West Bengal chief minister, who had even called him an agent of the BJP and had accused him of trying to malign and destabilise her government in the State.

The governor had strongly criticised the TMC government ahead of the Lok Sabha polls earlier this year when the BJP had attempted to cash in on the alleged atrocities on women at Sandeshkhali in the North 24 Parganas of the state.

He had lashed out at the TMC government for the violent incidents in the state after the polls. He had criticised Banerjee when mass protests swept the state in the wake of the rape and murder of a young doctor at a hospital in Kolkata.

Though the West Bengal unit of the BJP had joined the protests against the rape and murder of the doctor and held rallies and demonstrations across the state, the saffron party’s central leadership had not been very vocal against the TMC government in the state on this issue.

The BJP, which emerged as the main opposition party in West Bengal in 2021, could not pose a significant challenge to the TMC in the parliamentary polls earlier this year and lost in all the assembly constituencies, which went to the bye-elections recently.

The TMC of late also extended support to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government at the Centre on the issue of the alleged persecution of Hindus in Bangladesh.

The state BJP heavyweight and the Leader of the Opposition in the legislative assembly of West Bengal, Suvendu Adhikari recently said that the BJP MPs would also join their TMC counterparts in raising issues related to the interests of the state.