All like-minded parties should come together against BJP, says Mamata

Asked whether she will lead the Opposition parties, Banerjee said the country will lead the Opposition unity

All political parties opposed to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) should come together, West Bengal Chief Minister and Trinamool Congress supremo Mamata Banerjee said on Tuesday, even as she refrained from claiming the leadership of the proposed opposition coalition, stating that it would be led by the nation itself.

Banerjee will have a ‘chai-pe-charcha’ with the Congress president Sonia Gandhi on Wednesday. She is also likely to meet Nationalist Congress Party chief Sharad Pawar, Aam Aadmi Party supremo and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal as well as the leaders of other opposition parties over the next few days.

“Though the next Lok Sabha election is still some time away, we (opposition parties) should start planning for it (to take on the BJP),” she told journalists, adding, “We also have assembly polls coming up in the states like Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and Tripura”.

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The Trinamool Congress leader is currently on a visit to New Delhi – her first after leading her party to a landslide victory in the assembly polls in West Bengal in March and April this year. She is keen to build on her success in stalling the BJP’s juggernaut in West Bengal to play a more prominent role in national politics, particularly in bringing the parties opposed to the BJP together.

“All like-minded parties should come together,” said Banerjee, who had meetings with Kamal Nath and Anand Sharma of the Congress on Tuesday.

She said that the efforts to forge national coalition of opposition parties against the BJP would gather momentum when the current Monsoon Session of Parliament would get over and the Covid-19 situation would improve further across the country.

A journalist asked the Trinamool Congress supremo if she would lead the proposed coalition of the opposition parties. “No, I will not. The country will lead. We are just followers,” she said, apparently to make it sure that the issue of leadership does not trigger a row among the opposition parties and stymie efforts to build the coalition against the BJP. She, however, dodged a question by another journalist, who asked if she or her Trinamool Congress was emerging as the natural choice for the leadership of the opposition coalition.

Nath and Sharma later told journalists that they had lauded and congratulated her for trouncing the BJP in the assembly polls in West Bengal despite aggressive campaigning by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Union Home Minister Amit Shah.

Sharma, according to the sources, drove home the point during his meeting with Banerjee that the Congress, being a national party, would have to be a part of any coalition against the BJP.

The Trinamool Congress leader also had a meeting with Congress MP, Abhishek Manu Singhvi, who was elected to the Rajya Sabha from West Bengal in 2018.

The Congress contested the assembly polls in West Bengal against the Trinamool Congress, but the two parties 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’ 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.

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.

Her arch rival in West Bengal, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), too recently signalled that it was not opposed to work with the Trinamool Congress at the national level to counter the BJP.