From May 2, the day results for the assembly elections were announced and the BJP met with its waterloo, the fidgety Shah has been working on the plan not to allow Mamata to form the government and to take control of the state administration. But he could not succeed. After this first failure, he sent the team of the central officials to go around the state and prepare a report recommending imposition of President’s rule. Senior RSS leaders were also involved in preparing the blue print.

It was part of their design that two BJP leaders, one a common worker and second, advocate Priyanka Tibrewal, the BJP candidate for the Entally Assembly, were asked to move a PIL before the High Court. Usually a five member bench is not constituted to hear this nature of case, but the petitioners succeeded in convincing the court. Unfortunately for them the verdict of the bench has shattered their dream project. The acting Chief Justice Rajesh Bindal during the hearing said; “The steps taken by the state in bringing the situation to normalcy are appreciable. However, the central government has similar responsibility to maintain the law-and-order situation of the state after the poll results”. This order smashed the design of Amit Shah.

The High Court was not only satisfied with state's handling of post-poll violence, it also rejected additional solicitor-general's (representing the Modi government) prayer to set up a special investigation team to probe the same. The other four judges on the special bench were Justices I.P. Mukerji, Harish Tandon, Soumen Sen and Subrata Talukdar.

The problem of Shah and his mentor Narendra Modi is that the two treat themselves as too big. They think there is none in India who is above them. Modi in public does not like China, but in practice he is too willing to run through his mechanism of having one party. Not too long, just after coming to power in 2014, he said that he intends to create Congress Mukt Bharat. Since Modi-Shah combine had fought the Bengal election to finish TMC and Mamata, it is easy to understand that they could tolerate their existence.

With the Mamata thwarting their design, the chances have brightened that the BJP may lose the elections to Uttar Pradesh, Goa, Manipur, Punjab, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Gujarat where assembly elections would be held in 2022 and also in Meghalaya, Nagaland, Tripura, Karnataka, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Mizoram, Rajasthan, Telangana where elections are due in 2023. The election to the Lok Sabha will be in 2024.

Though Modi has been projected as the villain by the global media for his failure to tackle the challenges of corona, one thing is certain that in future too he would focus more on the elections than accepting the challenges of economic slowdown and salvaging the country from the onslaught of corona. The economy has been hit by two waves of the pandemic and the third is already lurking. The government has lost control over both the pandemic and the economy. Both lives and livelihoods deserve to be saved.

Even after the High Court has appreciated the efforts of Mamata in controlling violence, Dhankar is busy giving shape to his plan. On Sunday he sanctioned the CBI request to prosecute TMC MLAs Subrata Mukherjee, Firhad Hakim and Madan Mitra, and former BJP leader Sovan Chatterjee in the Narada sting case. In all fairness he could have discussed this with the chief minister. The action by central agencies is seen more as an act of vendetta by Delhi. Incidentally on the same day Mamata named Mukherjee and Hakim cabinet ministers. The CBI claims that all four were caught accepting bribes on camera. The sting operation tapes were released ahead of the 2016 Assembly polls. They were allegedly filmed in 2014, when all four were ministers. The Calcutta HC has also ordered a CBI probe in the case in March 2017.

Interestingly the IT cell of BJP is still carrying out vilification campaign against Mamata and her government. Numerous fact-checking exercises by AltNews and others have revealed that many videos and pictures have been circulated by the saffron camp and its followers on social media. The godi media has been using these fake videos to create an atmosphere that Hindu-Muslim riots have acquired greater dimension. Most of these videos are from other states and quite old, some even are ten year old.

The new BJP turncoats who came from TMC are strongly advocating for imposition of article 356 of the Constitution. Outlandish demand “reducing it to a Kashmir-like rubble” to a “third Partition” of the state (creating a new state comprising of hill regions including Darjeeling) are being made by the saffron vigilantes. Just after her swearing Mamata had said; “ Some are saying things that make one shiver…one feels intensely provoked....But we must not get provoked. Bengal is the place where Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Buddhists… live in amity, it is cosmopolitan, inclusive, humanist”.

Meanwhile, sharp differences have surfaced between the old cadre and turncoats of the BJP. A couple of days back the state BJP chief Dilip Ghosh asked national leaders to leave the state as the state leaders were capable to handle the situation. He alleged that these leaders have lowered the image of the party in the eyes of the Bengalis and especially amongst the women of the state. The central leaders are confused at his stand and feel that he was simply reverberating the political line of Mamata that the people campaigning for the saffron camp during the Bengal elections were “bohiragawto (outsiders)”. Surprisingly Ghosh’s comments were received with applause by members of the state committee.

Already some turncoats have started maintaining distance from the party leaders and its functioning. Mukul Roy the prime strategist who led the exodus has been in constant touch with his old TMC colleagues. Speculations are also rife that some of the turncoats may come back to their paternal party. Some old leaders and also a section of turncoats nurse the feeling that the national leaders had failed to identify themselves with the culture of Bengal, an issue Mamata had been consistently raising in her speeches. These leaders also blame unnecessary intervention responsible for the poll debacle.

Much against Amit Shah’s stand, the state leaders believe that any attempt to disturb or dislodge the Mamata government would prove disastrous; it would prove to be counterproductive. The people would hit the streets of Calcutta. Such a situation could not be controlled by brutal use of central security forces. Instead of pursuing the line of confrontation, the state leadership should be allowed to devise its own mechanism and strategy to meet the challenges. There is also a lurking fear amongst the leaders that any kind of confrontation would eventually lead to split in the party. (IPA Service)