When members of the same political party start sniping at each other just as their government is on the mat in the only state they control, what is the lay public to make of it? Either they are an undisciplined lot who hate each other and therefore do not miss a chance to hit out at each other even if it hurts their party’s image, or they are all acting in concert with the (hidden) agenda of drawing attention away from the actual crisis, with state elections just months away.

When a law student was raped inside a law college by an alumnus of that place (the multiple ironies should not be lost on anyone) in South Kolkata, the next few days saw three members of West Bengal’s ruling Trinamool Congress embroiled in a slanging match. If it was not bad enough that the two men—Kalyan Banerjee, MP and Madan Mitra, MLA—decided to blame the survivor, the woman, Mahua Moitra, MP, called out her own senior party colleagues for misogyny.

And that led Banerjee to lash out at Moitra, accusing her of being anti-women as she “broke up a family of 40 years" to tie the knot with the 65-year-old man—former Biju Janata Dal MP Pinaki Mishra—herself. This extraordinary personal attack in response to an ugly public intra-party spat, paints a very dismal picture of the nature of political discourse not only at the national level as both are MPs but also at the state level. More so as the two had clashed in April too.

On 4 April 2024, Banerjee and Moitra had a heated exchange at the Election Commission of India building where they had both gone as part of a TMC delegation to submit a representation. It got so acrimonious that Moitra reportedly told security personnel to “arrest"........

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