BJP’s stellar performance may have been the outcome of Assembly elections in three northeastern states, but the infighting within the Opposition camp is the main highlight that left political pundits wondering if it is the last straw in Opposition unity ahead of the 2024 general elections.
Despite repeatedly announcing their desire to contain BJP’s Hindutva juggernaut, Opposition parties like Congress and Trinamool Congress failed to stitch up a formidable alliance for the polls. To make matters worse, top leaders of Congress and TMC publicly traded barbs during the election campaigning.
And the damage caused by the enmity between Congress and TMC arising out of their quest to dominate Opposition space was evident in the election outcome. Both parties failed to notch up double digits in any of the three states – Tripura, Meghalaya and Nagaland.
While both Congress and TMC won five seats in Meghalaya, they failed to impress voters in Tripura where political strategist Prashant Kishore had tried to help Didi – as TMC supremo Banerjee is popularly called – gain a foothold. While Congress was reduced to just three seats, TMC could not even open its account.
Among the three states, it is Meghalaya where the tone and tenor of election campaigning was eagerly watched by political experts. The state witnessed fiery verbal exchanges between leaders of the grand old party and TMC – which became the main opposition party after inducting 12 out of 17 Congress MLAs last year.
The already strained relationship between TMC and the Congress party took another beating on February 22 when Rahul Gandhi launched a direct attack on Bengal’s ruling party, pointing out the latter’s “history” – a reference to the scams that key TMC politicians were found to be involved in.
Understandably, Gandhi’s comments riled up TMC promoting its all-powerful national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee, nephew of party supremo Mamata Banerjee, unleashed his verbal volleys to declare the grand old party irrelevant.
Banerjee said Congress’ “irrelevance, incompetence and insecurity has put them in a state of delirium”.
On Wednesday, just a day before the counting of votes, TMC’s Meghalaya unit claimed to form the government in the state. Though it won only five seats, TMC leaders consider the results an excellent outcome.
Speaking to The New Indian, TMC Rajya Sabha MP Shantanu Sen said, “The result shows that we got Meghalaya’s support and TMC will play an important and pivotal role in the formation of the next government.”
“In a very short span of time, we got a significant percentage of votes,” he said, adding that the party hopes to do much better in Tripura in the next elections.