There is a saying in the Bible: when the blind leads the blind, both fall into the ditch together. A denouement of this nature is awaiting the two adventurers who are entering an unknown territory although their objectives are clear.

Anna, for instance, is trying to rediscover his lost touch with the Trinamool Congress leader’s help, but seems to have chosen the worst possible partner to do so. But, if he had to select someone from distant West Bengal to boost his sinking image, the reason is that there is no one in the immediate vicinity of Delhi and Maharashtra who will go along with him.

It is no secret that Anna has always been a marginal figure in his home state. Nothing showed his irrelevance in Maharashtra more starkly than the empty spaces which greed his anti-corruption rally in Mumbai in December, 2011.

Only a few months earlier, he was the cynosure of all eyes during his successful campaigns in Delhi, which made his followers of the time declare in a television programme that the country was on the verge of a seminal political transformation when the present system will become a forgotten relic of the past. This megalomania was reflected in slogans like Anna is India, India Anna, chanted by Kiran Bedi and other admirers.

But, the sparse crowds at the Mumbai meeting deflated Anna’s balloon. Since then, he has been unable to breathe fresh air into it, not least because Arvind Kejriwal probably saw the writing on the wall and deserted the sinking ship. Anna has been looking for political support ever since his followers started drifting away, including Gen. V.K. Singh, who has joined the BJP. The RSS, too, seems to have lost its earlier interest in him.

If the moralist from Ralegan Siddhi has finally chosen Mamata, it is apparently because he is unaware of her undistinguished record in office. The West Bengal chief minister’s only claim to fame is that she bearded the lion, viz. the CPI(M), in its own den. For the latter, however, it was a disaster waiting to happen. After three decades of high-handed rule and the absence of economic growth following the flight of capital from the state when the Marxists first assumed power, the field was left open for anyone gutsy enough to challenge them,

Mamata was that person. But, she failed to outgrow her street-fighting traits on entering Writers Building (just as Kejriwal could not ditch his activism) with the result that West Bengal remains in the backwaters and the middle class is becoming disillusioned with her. Her suspicion that all the sexual violence in the state is the result of Leftist conspiracy and her reluctance to set up a Lokayukta so favoured by Anna make the two of them strange bedfellows.

Even then, just as Anna is looking for a helping hand at a time of political change, Mamata is on a similar quest. However, her earlier attempt to win friends and influence people led to a fiasco when Mulayam Singh Yadav ditched her when she was trying to project someone other than Pranab Mukherjee as the presidential candidate.

The episode showed that she hadn’t a clue about politics outside West Bengal. The same ignorance will inform her interactions with Anna while the latter cannot have any idea about her intense antipathy towards the CPI(M), one of whose leaders, Brinda Karat, shared a stage with Anna in Delhi when his campaign was at its height.

What is evident from Anna’s jibes against the “power hungry” Kejriwal, accusing him of holding on to his official apartment when Mamata has been living all along in her modest house in a Kolkata lane, is that the man who lives in a temple in Ralegan Siddhi is unhappy about being upstaged by his former disciple. The guru now wants to claw his way back into reckoning. But, in doing so, he appears to have abandoned some of his own ideas such as having little to do with politics.

What he is trying, however, with Mamata’s help is a variation of Third Front politics with the difference that the duo will be lost in the crowd of more than a dozen regional parties engaged in checking out the electoral worth of possible partners. In their midst, the other-worldly crusader, who has been described as a well-meaning, if slightly dumb, neighbourhood uncle, and the feisty Bengali who is all at sea in Hindi heartland politics, will find it difficult to navigate in the choppy waters.

Both Anna and Mamata have passed the high points of their careers. In the former’s case, it is his success in forcing a reluctant government’s hands on the Lokpal bill which will ensure that his name is not forgotten in a hurry. Where Mamata is concerned, it is her success in trouncing the Left in one of its bastions which will be remembered in history. As for the present, it is futile for them to hope to play a major role in national politics. (IPA Service)