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Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

TMC’s LoP in Bengal has given BJP control over both govt and Opposition. Mamata is rudderless

The new BJP government, which has hit the ground running with decisive but hotly debated moves, will gain from an opposition it can control.

There is no way of knowing if the first head of Soviet Russia Vladimir Lenin did indeed say: “The best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves”. But the quote, often attributed to him, succinctly sums up the current state of political play in West Bengal.

As expelled TMC MLA Ritabrata Banerjee was appointed Leader of Opposition (LoP) in the West Bengal Assembly on 3 June, with the support of 58 of 80 Trinamool MLAs, and party supremo Mamata Banerjee was left rudderless, West Bengal is staring at an Opposition-mukt state. It is a situation where a state’s ruling party controls both the government and the opposition, like Lenin may have once prescribed.

Ironically, it is the same Ritabrata Banerjee, who had declared that he understood Lenin’s famous dictum on mass politics by watching Banerjee work among the masses!

There is perhaps no better way to describe what Ritabrata has done to Banerjee than borrowing a phrase that the Bard of Avon used to describe the betrayal of Julius Ceaser by his friend Brutus: “unkindest cut”. It was, after all, Banerjee who had helped resurrect his political career.

At just 35, the suave and erudite Ritabrata became a Rajya Sabha MP from the CPI(M). Considered close to both the former West Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharyya and former CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury, Ritabrata was the Left’s brightest young star. And then in September 2017, the CPI(M) expelled him for alleged “anti-party activities, moral degeneration and having a lifestyle beyond his known means”. That was........

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