Recently, senior journalist Sanjaya Baru, who served as the media advisor to PM Manmohan Singh, floated the idea of Mamata Banerjee as a possible Prime Minister contender in an article in The Telegraph, and journalist-turned-Trinamool Congress (TMC) MP Sagarika Ghose seconded it.
Apart from TMC leaders, the DMK and Uddhav Thackeray’s Shiv Sena (UBT) have also supported the idea, while the Samajwadi Party (SP), the second-largest Opposition party in the Lok Sabha after the Congress, has responded cautiously.
SP president Akhilesh Yadav believes it is “premature” to be thinking about the PM candidate for 2029 at this stage and that the Opposition must not lose sight of its priorities. “First, we have to defeat the BJP in West Bengal and in Uttar Pradesh,” he told me. ”At the moment, we are not thinking about anything else.” Akhilesh does not want new “political tangles” to thwart the non-BJP parties from taking on the ruling dispensation. “Nor has anyone approached us on the matter,” he said.
Though Akhilesh did not say as much, an issue as sensitive as the leadership of the INDIA bloc is hardly likely to be sorted out publicly, given that such matters are usually decided behind closed doors. However, the idea is appealing to a section in the Opposition because, for a start, projecting Mamata is likely to go down well with the constituency of women in the country, who have increasingly become a crucial factor in elections.
Mamata is among the few women politicians who have risen from the ranks, clawed their way to the top and emerged as mass leaders in their own right. She has done this without belonging to a political family or without being helped on by a mentor, as in the case of most politically successful women in the country.
Like her or loathe her — she can be faulted on many fronts — Mamata has a proven record of delivering politically. She got the better of veterans in her own party, tall figures such as Pranab Mukherjee and Priya Ranjan Dasmunsi; broke ranks with the Congress; launched the TMC in 1998; went on to take the Congress’s place; and then brought down the Left Front that had been entrenched in the state for 34 years. Since then, she has managed to push back an ascendant BJP in two Assembly and three Lok Sabha elections. That is no small achievement.
Mamata is a known fighter, remembered in her younger days as a Congress worker who climbed atop the bonnet of Jayaprakash Narayan’s car in protest during the Emergency. I also recall how she once made a dramatic entry in Parliament in a wheelchair and swathed in bandages, using optics to allege that she had been beaten up at the instance of the Left.
The obstacles
And yet, it is also true that Mamata’s political capital is limited to one state. Her forays into smaller states such as Goa, Meghalaya, and Tripura after 2021 did not have the traction she expected. If she becomes the Opposition’s PM choice, she will be pitted against Narendra Modi who continues to enjoy national acceptance. All the regional satraps in the INDIA bloc, confined as they are to one state, face the same problem as her.
Congress leaders, too, will oppose Mamata’s candidature. They view Rahul Gandhi as the natural choice for PM because the Congress is the largest Opposition party in the Lok Sabha and still has a pan-India presence. It is another matter that Gandhi has not clicked so far as an alternative to Modi and the Congress has been losing elections.
Of course, there is nothing to stop a “one-state” regional leader from leading a national coalition. This happened in 1996 when former Karnataka CM H D Deve Gowda became the PM at the head of the multi-party United Front government that the Congress had propped up from outside. But the United Front was a post-poll formation and Deve Gowda did not last for long.
Several Opposition leaders believe that had Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar been projected as the INDIA bloc’s PM face in 2023, he might have stayed with the Opposition grouping. Kumar’s JD(U) might then have ensured that INDIA got the major chunk of the seats from Bihar, which would have led to an overall tally close to the majority mark in 2024. Ironically, it was Mamata who reportedly stymied the proposal to appoint Nitish as the INDIA bloc’s leader.
More about Bengal than India
Mamata could well be accepted as the leader of many of the anti-BJP regional parties if they decided to band together as an entity. There was a time when the regional parties had considered forming a federal front. Such a front could do business with the Congress depending on the outcome of the 2029 election, with arithmetic deciding who would be PM, were that eventuality to arise.
Today, the INDIA bloc is more of a platform rather than an electoral alliance. It is individual parties that bilaterally decide with whom they align in an election. The SP and the Congress (not the INDIA bloc) will, for instance, decide whether they tie up in UP in 2027. And yet, all of a sudden, why is Mamata being projected at this juncture as the alliance’s possible PM candidate, just before West Bengal goes to the polls?
So far, Mamata’s hold on the poorer sections in rural areas, on women and minorities, her social welfare programmes, her booth-level organisation, her feisty spirit, and a subtle Bengali sub-nationalism have seen her through. She was quick to upbraid the PM for describing Ramakrishna Paramahansa, who is revered in Bengal, as “Swami” instead of referring to him as “Thakur” as Bengalis do. With this, she made the point that the BJP in the state is a party of “outsiders” who do not understand Bengali culture.
The possibility of a PM from Bengal can enthuse many in her favour. West Bengal has never thrown up a PM. Jyoti Basu was offered the position in 1996, but the CPI(M) Politburo did not greenlight it, a decision that the former Bengal CM later described as a “historic blunder”. Congress leader Pranab Mukherjee held all the top Cabinet portfolios, from Finance to Defence to External Affairs, but he never got the top job and is now viewed as a PM India did not get.
If truth be told, “Mamata for PM” is more about West Bengal than about India or the INDIA bloc. It is more about 2026 than about 2029. Faced with 15 years of anti-incumbency, Mamata Banerjee needs more than the old slogans to generate new energies in her favour.
(Neerja Chowdhury, Contributing Editor, The Indian Express, has covered the last 11 Lok Sabha elections. She is the author of How Prime Ministers Decide.)