Mamata Banerjee’s offer to lead I.N.D.I.A. is difficult to refuse

Mamata Banerjee capacity to read the public mood is exceptional. The call for a change in the I.N.D.I.A. bloc leadership is a notice to regional parties that to remain part of the collective, the Congress needs to be pushed to step aside.

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s announcement that she is prepared to lead the anti-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Opposition bloc since she was certainly a lead architect of the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (I.N.D.I.A.) is a scathing indictment of the Congress on the one hand and it is a message to the 28 parties that it is time for a shake-up. The almost immediate reaction affirming Banerjee’s capability and her stature as a national leader from India’s eldest statesman, Sharad Pawar of his shrunken faction of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) is strong support.

The offer can be read in two ways; notice to the Congress that it should step aside from its role as leader of the I.N.D.I.A. bloc or be humiliatingly ousted; and a polite nudge to Pawar that after failing to salvage his dismembered party in the recent Maharashtra elections, he should gracefully hand over the mantle of shepherding the coalition to Banerjee. While other partners of the I.N.D.I.A. bloc have not formally affirmed their confidence in the Trinamool Congress (TMC) leader, by all accounts several parties have informally approved her initiative to tell the Congress that it is time for the grand old party to step aside.

A flailing and failing Congress as the results in Haryana, Jammu & Kashmir, and Maharashtra confirm does not have the capacity to lead by providing energy, direction, and drive to other parties. Without saying as much, Banerjee is implying that the Congress is a liability because it can neither successfully serve its own agenda nor can it provide effective support to other parties on issues that matter regionally and, by extension, nationally as well as hyper local matters that are urgently important to voters. In other words, it cannot pull its own weight and cannot support other parties by being a success.

The point that Banerjee is making is significant; her argument appears to be that the Congress has been monopolising the platform of the I.N.D.I.A. bloc to serve its own agenda, heedless of the fact that not everyone and certainly not voters across India are as invested in uncovering the allegedly nefarious goings on of Gautam Adani and the prime minister. By offering to take up the task of leading the I.N.D.I.A. bloc, the TMC leader is signalling that the bloc must serve as a platform for the parties that represent the people inside and outside Parliament on a multiplicity of urgent issues.

The antecedents of the I.N.D.I.A. bloc are important to unbundle to figure out what Banerjee is saying and why other regional parties are or have distanced themselves from the Congress. The Opposition bloc was birthed after three rounds of highly publicised conclaves in Patna, Mumbai, and Bengaluru, where other smaller, albeit nameless groups collectively and the constituent parties individually decided that in order to combat the BJP juggernaut, a united effort was required. The Congress and its United Progressive Alliance (UPA) partners were one of the formations; the others were huddles like the Mamata Banerjee-Arvind Kejriwal-Akhilesh Yadav one, or the Left Front one. Parties like the then united NCP, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), the Janata Dal (United) under Nitish Kumar-Jharkhand Mukti Morcha-National Conference were part of the Congress group as well as the anti-Congress, anti-BJP cluster.

The I.N.D.I.A. bloc came together as a pooling in exercise to fight the hegemonistic dreams of the Narendra Modi-led BJP, and its designs of reinventing the idea of India as ‘One Nation, One Election’, and, by inference, ‘one party’ backed up by the Uniform Civil Code and a majority in Parliament that would abandon the concept of the power of the legislature keeping the executive in check and function as a rubber stamp. The parties that underwrote the venture shared an understanding that confronting the mightier and limitlessly resourceful BJP was not something that could be done by staying small; they needed to go big.

The strategy was of creating a bloc that could collectively give the BJP a run for its money, because the constituents of the I.N.D.I.A. bloc were powerful and successful regional parties. The plan of the collective backing up the powerful or dominant regional party on home turf to take on the BJP worked in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections by denying it absolute majority in Parliament, and making it dependent on the Telegu Desam Party (TDP) and the fickle JD(U).

By announcing that she was willing to take on the role of the helmswoman of the bloc, Banerjee effectively called the formation a ship in danger of keeling over. There is a vacuum in the I.N.D.I.A. bloc leadership, of a leader who is skilled in negotiating with other leaders, soothing ruffled feathers and keeping the Congress on course, following the passing of Sitaram Yechury, the Communist Party of India Marxist general secretary, in September. That vacancy needs to be filled. While Banerjee cannot be Yechury’s stand-in, she does have the stature of a national leader, who is feisty and successful.

In doing so, she seems to have had a rethink on the role and responsibilities of the I.N.D.I.A. bloc in national level politics as well as in state level politics. In 2022 and certainly in 2024 in the run up to the Lok Sabha election, Banerjee was adamant that the I.N.D.I.A. bloc as a collective would not meddle in how dominant regional parties on their home turf fought the BJP; that is, she was not willing to go in for seat sharing negotiations in West Bengal, and was lukewarm to the idea in other states.

Back then, she seemed to believe that regional parties locked in one-to-one fights against the BJP had a better chance of winning than getting into complicated and unsatisfactory seat sharing deals with uncertainly over transfer of votes and squabbles over rebels and past rivalries.

The offer to lead is a shift and probably a recalibration of how best the anti-BJP Opposition, weighed down by a Congress in a downward spiral signalling a return to its state of permanent existential crisis, can take on the resurgent BJP under a triumphant Modi, backed by the robust network of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

This move seems to be an admission that the moral and morale support, like a certificate of approval or membership, of a credible collective is necessary to take on the BJP and its National Democratic Alliance (NDA) allies, even for parties like the TMC which is the dominant force in West Bengal.

The Modi-led BJP’s resurgence within six months of the Lok Sabha elections seems to have compelled Banerjee to revise her views. Her capacity to read the public mood is exceptional. The call for a change in the I.N.D.I.A. bloc leadership is a notice to regional parties that to remain part of the collective, the Congress needs to be pushed to step aside. How the other partners respond is not, as yet, clear.

(Shikha Mukerjee Is a Kolkata-based senior journalist.)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.