BJP need to tweak its strategies to defeat Mamata Banerjee

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is making the same mistake time and again of taking on Mamata Banerjee through not-so-political means. The three-time Chief Minister of Bengal, aptly called the stormy petrel, cannot be fought with Tweets from the Governor or former Governor of two neighboring states. Nor can she be fought with uncouth, verbal diarrhea of a former state party president. The strategy of making fun out of her apparently simpleton gestures and postures by the Prime Minister, Home Minister or other top leaders of the saffron brigade does not work against her. She cannot be taken on with the snooty urban apathy towards so-called unsophisticated and unpolished vocabulary or sentence construction. The more these things are tried out against her, the stronger she emerges. The results of the last state assembly polls followed by Kolkata Municipal Corporation polls and then the civic body polls in different parts of the State, one by one, are cases in point.

The recent reported and projected feud within the party notwithstanding, Mamata Banerjee and her party have gone increasingly stronger (in electoral politics, at least) by the day. You like it or not, this is a fact, in black and white. Mamata Banerjee's Trinamul Congress has regained (or started to regain) its lost ground in north Bengal as well, much to the worries of the saffron brigade.

Much more matured and an astute politician now, the once fire-brand opposition leader and now the third time CM knows exactly when, where and how to intervene in party affairs. She also knows how to put a spoke into the wheels of over ambitious leaders. She does not even mind doing the same thing, if some over ambition gets reflected on her own parts as well.

Consider how she did not let her party contest the UP polls after the initial gung-ho, and eventually decided to extend support to Akhilesh Yadav-led political front. Similarly, after giving a long rope to the party's youth and youthful brigade, on the day of the Goa polls, she made it clear that they were not expecting to win Goa (although she said her party would do much better than it is expected), they were keen on reaching out to every homes in Goa and build party organisation in that State. In Tripura also, the party is suddenly going slow. Unlike some of the top BJP leaders, including the Prime Minister, Home Minister, their national party president, who had virtually camped in Bengal before the polls and toured & campaigned across the length and breadth of the state, Mamata did not do anything of that sort, so that she can be blamed in the eventuality of a poll debacle.

She has somehow realised that she would not have to branch out physically, thereby running the risk of loss of face in some cases, to come up as a strong contender for the most coveted post, or the strongest challenger to Modi-Shah's leadership. She can jolly well do that by virtue of her party's electoral performances within the State and her government's performance within its jurisdiction. The Saffron mandarins, therefore, need to tweak and re-work their strategies, politically, in case they are serious about taking her on, on her home turf.