Sonia to have a 'chai-pe-charcha' with Mamata amid growing signs of Congress and Trinamool Congress coming closer

With the signs of the two parties coming closer becoming increasingly visible, Congress president Sonia Gandhi is likely to have a “chai-pe-charcha” with Trinamool Congress supremo Mamata Banerjee, who will arrive in New Delhi on Monday.

Banerjee is also likely to meet Nationalist Congress Party president Sharad Pawar during her first visit to the national capital. Banerjee led the Trinamool Congress to a landslide victory against the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the assembly elections in West Bengal in March and April and took over as the Chief Minister of the State for the third consecutive term since 2011. The leaders of other opposition parties, including the Samajwadi Party, Aam Aadmi Party, Rashtriya Janata Dal, Shiv Sena and others, are also expected to meet her in New Delhi.

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She is keen to use her visit to the national capital to build on her success in stalling the BJP’s juggernaut in West Bengal and signal her and Trinamool Congress’s intent to play a more prominent role in national politics, particularly in uniting the political parties opposed to the BJP.

Her meeting with Gandhi is likely to take place at the residence of the Congress president, who, according to the sources, invited her for a cup of tea.

The Congress on Sunday also signalled its willingness to close ranks with the Trinamool Congress with a tweet slamming Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government for allegedly shortlisting the phone of Banerjee’s nephew and newly appointed national general secretary of her party, Abhishek Bandopadhyay, for surveillance during the elections in West Bengal.

The Congress campaigned against the Trinamool Congress after forging an alliance with the Left Front and the Indian Secular Front to contest the assembly elections in West Bengal. But neither the grand old party nor its communist partners could win a single seat in the State Assembly.

The Congress and the Trinamool Congress, however, reached out to each other over the past few weeks. The Congress high-command purportedly asked the party’s West Bengal unit chief Adhir Chowdhury to tone down criticism against the Trinamool Congress and its supremo, in view of the larger goal of building a nationwide coalition against the Modi Government.

When Banerjee addressed a virtual rally to observe the Trinamool Congress’s annual Martyrs’ Day on July 21, P Chidambaram and Digvijay Singh of the Congress drove to the Constitution Club in New Delhi to listen to her.