Now or never

Now or never

Filing her nomination, it’s Mamata’s final chance to get elected and remain the CM.

If any sort of elections are announced in West Bengal, can mudslinging and name-calling be far behind? Barely had the Election Commission of India announced the byelection to three Assembly seats (Bhabanipur, Jangipur and Samserganj) on September 30 than the Enforcement Directorate issued fresh summons to Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s nephew Abhishek Banerjee in connection with a money laundering case. Now, Mamata is not the one to sit back and lick her wounds. She promptly called the BJP leaders “worse than Duryodhana and Dushasana” for foisting false cases on and “unnecessarily harassing” her party leaders. Earlier, in the run-up to the Assembly elections in March-April, the State’s parties were highly charged and armed with slogans highlighting their USPs as well as barbs for the other contenders. The temperatures soared and the campaign soon turned acrimonious. Remember, when Mamata injured her ankle during electioneering, the BJP leaders taunted her first with the allegations that she was “doing drama” for the sake of garnering sympathy votes, and subsequently advised her in mock sympathy to “wear a skirt”. There was also a lot of chest-beating between the TMC and the BJP leaders over her “Khela hobe” and “Bengal’s daughter” remarks.

When the BJP told then Uttarakhand CM Tirath Singh Rawat to resign as he was unable to get elected to the Assembly within six months (no polls could be held due to COVID-19), there was hush-hush talk in political circles that the move was actually aimed at putting moral pressure on Mamata, who was sailing in the same boat after having been defeated in Nandigram by confidant-turned-rebel Suvendu Adhikari. Unperturbed, the Bengali street-fighting leader ignored all such insinuations, besides of course appealing to the Election Commission intermittently to allow the byelections since the pandemic had relatively subsided. Now that the bypoll has finally been announced, she is scheduled to file her nomination papers for Bhabanipur on Friday. One can only hope that wise counsel prevails on both sides (the Congress has anyway decided to sit out of the contest) and that the bypolls can be conducted in the honest sense of electoral politics and democracy so that people can give their verdict, ending the state of uncertainty in Bengal and giving it the rightful head of the State in the real meaning of the phrase.