The day Bengal's political chessboard turned upside down for Mamata

There is a common sentiment that plays in Kolkata: time moves relatively slower. But that was not to be on a politically charged day in Bengal, when the needle swung rapidly. And at the heart of it was Nandigram.

The symbolism was not lost.

While the pieces were being moved from the Chief Minister’s Secretariat in Howrah, the battlefield lay 150 kilometres away in the far-flung South Bengal town.

Nandigram had once made Mamata, helping topple the powerful Left government. Now, it has unmade her. She is left without a candidate in the upcoming bypolls, and the one she said she would back from the Congress was arrested moments later.

And between then and now stands Suvendu Adhikari.

Her aide-in-chief, who helped Mamata spring up the ladder during the Nandigram uprising nearly two decades ago, is now hastening her descent as her bete noire.

All this happened on a day when her party’s 28-year legacy was at stake. The Election Commission froze the grass with two flowers symbol -- hand-drawn by Mamata as she conceptualised the party’s emblem -- along with the party’s name.

And the key challenger to the Trinamool’s name and symbol is the other faction, which goes by “Bhalo Trinamool” in Bengal, translating to “good guys." It is led by Ritabrata Banerjee, who would have been barely voting age when Mamata walked out of Congress to form the party she is now wrestling over.

Mamata’s camp has been given the football player symbol, while Ritabrata’s camp has been given the envelope.

To sum it up, before untangling the threads of an eventful day: Mamata lost her party name and symbol -- though both remain up for grabs, depending on how the EC eventually adjudicates the tug-of-war between her and Ritabrata, with the aggrieved faction likely to challenge the decision in the Supreme Court.

She also lost her Nandigram candidate, and even the Congress candidate she said she would support.

If this day has to be tied into one thread, there are several battles being fought at once.

For Mamata, it is a war of existence -- her identity, her footprint and her legacy. A battle that has shrunk from the national front, to the state, and now to within her own ranks.

THE BYPOLL THAT BECAME A BIGGER BATTLE

With barely a few weeks to go for the Nandigram bypoll on October 6, the result had appeared almost a foregone conclusion, with the BJP well ahead.

The party has fielded Hasirani Rath, mother of Suvendu Adhikari’s personal assistant Chandranath Rath, who was shot a day after the results that propelled Adhikari to the Chief Minister’s seat.

Until recently, Adhikari had repeatedly alleged that Chandranath Rath was killed by the “Bhaipo gang” -- a reference to Mamata Banerjee’s camp, particularly her nephew Abhishek.

On the other hand, Mamata’s candidate, Sanchita Pradhan De, came with no electoral experience. But her candidature had already raised eyebrows. She was among the 26,000 teachers who lost their jobs following the West Bengal teachers’ recruitment scam and were later reinstated by the Supreme Court.

Her name alone carried the faintest shadow of a scandal that had unfolded under Mamata’s government.

In a way, the Nandigram battle had been lost before the votes were even cast.

Yet the nondescript bypoll has suddenly caught the nation’s attention. Even the Congress High Command, whose focus on Bengal had faded into near-oblivion, has now been pulled into the fight.

SUVENDU PUTS MAMATA IN CHECK

It all played out on Thursday evening.

De was quietly summoned to Adhikari’s office at Nabanna, the state secretariat in Howrah. Around the same time, teams from Mamata’s and Ritabrata’s camps were in Delhi for the Election Commission hearing over who was the real TMC. By the end of it, the EC had temporarily barred both factions from using the party’s name and symbol.

While sources had earlier described it as a courtesy meeting, political circles had already got a whiff that something was amiss. After all, Suvendu Adhikari was both the Nandigram MLA and the Chief Minister, despite having resigned from the seat after choosing to take oath from Mamata Banerjee’s home turf, Bhabanipur. The suspicions were later proved right.

On Friday, De travelled back to Haldia, in the subdivision where Nandigram is located, to withdraw her candidature. This came hours after the EC allotted new names and symbols to the two camps.

In chess parlance, Suvendu had put Mamata in check.

Mamata responded with a counter-move of her own. Minutes after Suvendu’s move to corner her, she appeared before the press and announced that her party would not field a candidate in Nandigram. Instead, it would support the Congress candidate, Milan Pradhan.

The irony was hard to miss.

This was the party Mamata had left nearly three decades ago to form the TMC. The party she had long loathed in Bengal, even as the two joined hands at the Centre. And the same party the TMC had begun cosying up to after its drubbing in Bengal, prompting murmurs of a merger or “homecoming.”

Those speculations were dismissed by the Congress. So were the TMC’s overtures for a strategic alliance in the bypolls, particularly after Delhi reportedly received negative feedback from local Congress leaders.

Kalyan Banerjee, one of Mamata’s last remaining close associates, responded with disdain, declaring that the TMC would sever all future ties with the Congress.

THEN CAME THE CONGRESS TWIST

Searching for a way out of the corner, Mamata suddenly moved to mend fences with the Congress. The TMC would support the Congress in the Nandigram bypoll in Bengal and the Nagaon bypoll in Assam. Shortly after, the Assam unit announced that it would not field a candidate against the Congress.

All this, she said, was “for the greater interest of the nation.”

As the day hurtled forward in a political whirlwind, even before anyone could process Mamata’s counter-move, the Congress candidate she had pledged to support barely an hour earlier was arrested in a murder case dating back nearly two decades, to the time when Nandigram was up in arms over land acquisition.

This, too, caught the Congress High Command’s attention.

With free and fair elections at the heart of his years-long campaign against the BJP, Rahul Gandhi called the arrest the BJP’s bid to “end the electoral fight altogether”.

Party chief Mallikarjun Kharge described the Congress candidate's arrest as a “brazen attempt” at “vote chori” and “chunav chori”, calling it the “murder of democracy”.

The contrasts of the day were striking. Mamata had called the EC’s freeze on her party’s name and symbol a “black day” for democracy. Now, the Congress was crying foul over the arrest of the candidate she had pledged to support.

“The Congress will neither fear nor bow down. We will fight -- and we will win,” Rahul said.

The battle won't end here. The Congress is expected to take up the candidate’s arrest with the Election Commission, and the matter could eventually find its way to court ahead of the bypolls.

THE GAME IS STILL ON

Mamata has already gone knocking on the Supreme Court’s door, challenging the EC’s move to freeze her party’s name and symbol as illegal.

Now, all eyes are on Rejinagar. While Mamata has said the TMC will not contest against the Congress in Nandigram and Assam, she stopped short of making a similar commitment in Rejinagar, saying she would take a call later. Will she ask her candidate to withdraw and back the Congress there too?

Meanwhile, Mamata’s rival faction within the TMC, which has retained a sizeable chunk of MLAs from the undivided party, has fielded candidates in both Nandigram and Rejinagar. It has also welcomed the EC’s temporary freeze on the TMC’s name and symbol, while its leader, Ritabrata, has spoken out against “family rule” in an apparent dig at Mamata and Abhishek Banerjee.

For now, the chessboard remains crowded and the game far from over. Suvendu may have put Mamata in check, but she has not run out of moves.

With the EC battle, the court challenge, the Nandigram and Rejinagar bypolls, and a rival faction fighting for the party’s identity, the next move could come from anywhere. Five years after "khela hobe" became the battle cry of the Bengal polls, the game is still on -- only this time, the board has changed, and so have the players.