Kolkata: Being tough about Partha Chatterjee and going soft on Anubrata Mondal is now the announced stand of Trinamool Congress supremo and West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee.
Initially it was perceived that the party leadership will take the same stand on Anubrata Mondal that it had taken on Partha Chatterjee by stripping him of all his party and ministerial portfolios, after the latter was arrested by the Enforcement Directorate sleuths in connection with the multi-crore West Bengal School Service Commission recruitment scam. That perception became stronger as immediately after Mondal’s arrest by the Central Bureau of Investigation in connection with the multi-crore cattle smuggling racket in the state, finance minister Chandrima Bhattacharya told the media that as articulated by the party’s national general secretary, Abhishek Banerjee, the party leadership will continue to adopt a zero-tolerance approach to corruption.
However, the chief minister changed that perception on August 14 when at a programme on Independence Day eve she expressed her solidarity with Mondal, while refusing to take the name of Chatterjee even once. She made it clear that for her Mondal continues to carry much weight, while Partha Chatterjee is of no value anymore.
Getting the signal about Partha Chatterjee, senior party leaders also played the same tune. While on the one hand urban development & municipal affairs minister and Kolkata Mayor, Firhad Hakim said that Chatterjee brought shame to the party, party Lok Sabha member Saugata Roy said that the time has not come that Mondal brings shame to the party like Chatterjee.
The question now doing the rounds in political circles in the state is why Banerjee has taken different stands on the two, although in terms of power and position Chatterjee was more heavyweight than Mondal.
Opposition party leaders feel that the chief minister’s apparent softness towards Mondal is an attempt to boost the morale of the party workers which is at rock bottom following the successive arrests of Chatterjee and Mondal.
“After Partha Chatterjee’s arrest and with pictures of crores of rupees recovered from the residences of his close aide, Arpita Mukherjee floating all over, the chief minister had no other option but to disown him. She would have disowned Mondal as well had she not felt that the consecutive disowning will make the other leaders in the party rebel. Corruption and corrupt leaders are the pillars of Trinamool Congress. So, if she starts disowning everybody the party will cease to exist and so it was her compulsion to express solidarity with Mondal,” CPI(M) central committee member Sujan Chakraborty said.
Congress leader Kasutav Bagchi said that the chief minister’s expression of solidarity might have cheered up Mondal for the time being, but his happiness will be short lived. “The day the chief minister will feel that Mondal is becoming a threat to her as well as to her nephew Abhishek Banerjee she will not wait a minute to disown him as she has done in the case of Chatterjee. That is the past history of the chief minister. She uses people and then disowns them after the purpose is served,” Bagchi said.
BJP’s West Bengal president and party MP Sukanta Majumdar said that it is clear that the Trinamool Congress has given a raw deal to Partha Chatterjee. “Even he is saying that he is a victim of a conspiracy. So, he should open his mouth and name his superiors in his party who have received shares from the scam. Rest the central agencies will take care of,” he added.
According to political analyst Rajagopal Dhar Chakraborty it is a simple game of arithmetic that continues to make Mondal still a favourite of the chief minister while making Partha Chatterjee redundant.
“Since the 2019 Lok Sabha elections the BJP had made severe dents in Trinamool Congress forts in almost all districts of the state with Kolkata, South 24 Parganas, Howrah and Birbhum being the exceptions. Now in Birbhum district the sole credit for keeping the Trinamool Congress fort intact goes to Anubrata Mondal and that fort is bound to develop severe cracks if Mondal revolts. This means that the ruling party’s strong position in two Lok Sabha constituencies and 11 assembly constituencies in Birbhum district will be at stake. On the other hand, the organizational value of Partha Chatterjee is limited to the single assembly constituency which is Behala (West), from where he is still the MLA,” he explained.
The second reason for this different stand, according to veteran political analyst Arundhati Mukherjee, is mainly psychological. “The scam that has entangled Chatterjee is related to the teachers recruitment, which affects a comparatively large section of the common people spread across a wide geographical area. The cattle-smuggling scam with which Mondal’s name is associated does not really affect the public the way the teachers recruitment scam does,” she said.
The third factor, according to her, is that “pictures of the notes recovered from the residences of Partha Chatterjee’s close aide, Arpita Mukherjee are being broadcast by the media channels and the same pictures are floating around in the social media. However, so far, no such picture of cash is available in the case of Mondal. These pictures of cash recovered inevitably have more impact on public sentiment.”
–IANS
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