Mamata Banerjee with Abhishek Banerjee.
Credit: PTI Photo
Kolkata: Trinamool Congress supremo Mamata Banerjee on Monday asked her nephew and the party’s general secretary Abhishek Banerjee to take a more active role in national politics even as her close aides over the past two days raised the clamour for her to be made the face of the I.N.D.I.A. bloc.
Mamata entrusted Abhishek with the responsibility of coordinating with the Trinamool Congress’s members and of deciding the party’s approach and position on national issues, both within and outside Parliament. As she reconstituted the TMC national working committee on Monday, she, however, ensured that the ‘prabins’ – the old guards loyal to her – continued to outnumber her nephew’s close aides known as ‘nabins’ in West Bengal’s political circles.
The chief minister of West Bengal chaired a meeting of the TMC’s national working committee on Monday, just two days after the party won the bye-elections in all six assembly constituencies in the state, proving that its electoral fortunes remained unscathed by the three-month-long mass outrage over the August 9 rape and murder of a young doctor at a hospital run by the state government.
The TMC’s landslide victory in the bye-elections and the Congress’s debacle in Maharashtra just weeks after its poor show in Haryana prompted Mamata’s loyalists to publicly suggest that she should lead I.N.D.I.A. bloc in taking on the Bharatiya Janata Party. They pointed out that the TMC had stopped the BJP’s juggernaut in West Bengal while the Congress had failed to do so in Maharashtra and Haryana.
Mamata, however, on Monday asked Abhishek, who is also a member of the Lok Sabha, to play a more active and prominent role in national politics.
A section of the TMC leaders said that the move would undoubtedly lead to Abhishek being projected as the party’s face in national politics but would also curtail his role in the political arena of the state.
Mamata also elevated five veteran leaders, including the state assembly Speaker Biman Banerjee, minister Manas Bhunia, and the party member in the LS, Kalyan Banerjee, to the working committee.
Senior TMC leader and state minister Chandrima Bhattacharya told journalists that the party had constituted the Parliamentary Disciplinary Committee, the State Assembly Disciplinary Committee, and an apex state-level disciplinary committee. “If someone is issued a show-cause notice by any of these committees, he or she has to answer it. If a person gets three such show-cause notices, steps will be taken to suspend him or her,” said Bhattacharya.
Sources said that Mamata scotched all speculation about an imminent change of guard and made it clear in the meeting that she, herself, would lead the party in the 2026 state assembly elections.