Much water has evidently flown down the Ganga, a river that flows through both Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal, in the last 10 years after Trinamool Congress (TMC) chief Mamata Banerjee reportedly extended “unconditional support” to Akhilesh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party (DP) for the upcoming state elections and, in the process, seemingly buried the hatchet of a decade-old political heart burn.
Speaking to News18 after his meeting with the Bengal chief minister at her Kalighat residence in South Kolkata on Tuesday, SP’s national vice president and Akhilesh Yadav’s emissary, Kiranmoy Nanda, confirmed that the TMC will not contest in a single seat from UP.
Nanda’s statement drew curtains on speculations on whether the TMC would seek from Akhilesh the Mirzapur seat for its leader Laliteshpati Trapathi, the great grandson of former UP chief minister Kamalapati Tripathi who, along with his father Rajeshpati Tripathi, quit the Congress and joined the TMC in October last year.
At the same time, Banerjee’s gesture signaled that she may have moved on from the political embarrassment she suffered in the hands of Akhilesh’s father Mulayam Singh Yadav back in June 2012 over the issue of supporting Manmohan Singh or APJ Abdul Kalam’s candidature as President of India. That was when both leaders had initially come together against the UPA candidate Pranab Mukherjee – or, at least, Banerjee making that claim — for presidential polls but the SP chief made a last-minute somersault to support Mukherjee while leaving Banerjee lonely and red-faced.
“Mamata Banerjee has not asked for a single seat and made it clear that she would lend unconditional support to the Samajwadi Party for the upcoming polls,” Nanda said.
“Mamata Banerjee is not just a chief minister of a state or the chairperson of a party. She is the face of anti-BJP politics at the national level. That’s why we wanted her support and she agreed to extend her hand,” said Nanda, who remained a cabinet minister in the erstwhile Left Front government in Bengal for nearly three decades.
Nanda informed that Banerjee would be holding a virtual public meeting with Akhilesh Yadav in Lucknow on February which would be followed by a joint press conference. “We have also decided on a second vi8 rtual rally and press conference in Benaras subsequent to the Lucknow programme, but the date is yet to be fixed,” the veteran leader added.
The larger message, according to Nanda, that this gesture from Banerjee carries is that of opposition unity. “We are together in this. We supported Mamata Banerjee in her fight against the BJP in Bengal and she is now doing the same for us,” Nanda remarked.
The senior leader, however, avoided a direct answer to whether the Samajwadi Party would like to see Banerjee as a possible prime ministerial face for the Opposition camp in the 2024 general elections. “Let the 2022 state elections get over. Then we will see,” Nanda told News18.
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