Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

ThePrint On Camera Videos In Pictures

Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

ThePrint On Camera Videos In Pictures

Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

Mamata, Naveen, Nitish used Vajpayee-Advani’s BJP to climb up. They must pay back to Modi-Shah

There was a time when regional parties found in the BJP a convenient ally in their fight against then-dominant Congress. They realised too late that Modi-Shah’s BJP is different.

On one sultry afternoon in 2017, I was sitting with a senior Congress leader at his Safdarjung Road residence. He was morose. The Congress was going down the hill, but the party leadership looked clueless and indifferent.

“They don’t know the BJP. It’s like a tick. It enters your vein here (pointing to the ankle), and before you realise, it reaches here (pointing to the head),” he said. In 2020, he joined the Bharatiya Janata Party.

Mamata Banerjee couldn’t agree more, as her All India Trinamool Congress (AITC) melts down. She may recall the time when she had joined hands with the BJP in the 1998 Lok Sabha elections. Those were the days when Atal Bihari Vajpayee was desperately seeking to end the BJP’s political untouchability. Both gained from the alliance. Banerjee’s newly floated AITC ended up with seven Lok Sabha seats, while the BJP got its first-ever member from Bengal in the House of the People, Tapan Sikdar from Dum Dum. The BJP’s tally went up to two in the 1999 Lok Sabha elections. The same year, the BJP also got its first MLA in Bengal in a bypoll—Badal Bhattacharya from Ashoknagar.

The rest is history, as they say. Vajpayee was soon to have firsthand experience of Banerjee’s mercurial politics. She left the NDA in 2001 over the Tehelka expose and went with the Congress in the Assembly elections that year. She returned to the NDA ahead of the 2004 Lok Sabha elections, only to leave it again after the 2006 Assembly elections. That was the final parting. Their alliance had failed to click in the last three elections—two to the Assembly and one to Parliament. For her, the BJP’s political utility in her fight against the Left was over. Today, she might rue the fact that she gave the BJP legitimacy and credibility as a political force in West Bengal.

Former Odisha chief minister Naveen Patnaik might have similar feelings. A Delhi-based socialite, he was known as someone who loved his Dunhill cigarettes and Famous Grouse whisky when his father, Biju Patnaik, passed away in 1997. The BJP........

© ThePrint