West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee is likely to meet her Tamil Nadu counterpart MK Stalin in Chennai on Wednesday, sources in the state government said on Tuesday. Banerjee will fly to Chennai to attend the birthday function of West Bengal Governor La Ganesan’s elder brother on Thursday. Sources said Banerjee was likely to visit Stalin soon after reaching the Tamil Nadu capital.
With this move, political observers said, Mamata is making a play for the role of the face of the Opposition, out to stitch together an alliance of regional parties against the BJP-led government at the Centre. The scheduled visit drew flak from the Opposition that criticized Banerjee’s plan to attend the family program of a “temporary” governor on taxpayers’ money.
The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and the Enforcement Directorate’s (ED) investigations into various scams and subsequent arrests of senior party leaders dealt a major blow to the Trinamool Congress’s (TMC) prospects in national politics. The party leadership is trying to set its house in order first before taking the challenge to the BJP in other states.
Till December last year, Banerjee made attempts to emerge as the Opposition’s pivot against the BJP at the national level. Her credentials received a boost in May 2021 following her re-election as West Bengal CM for the third straight term. After that, she crisscrossed the country in a bid to position herself as the lead Opposition player against the BJP dispensation. Banerjee met a slew of Opposition leaders — from then Congress president Sonia Gandhi to Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar — to establish her role in stitching up an overarching Opposition alliance against the BJP. Banerjee’s efforts were not restricted to only visiting Opposition leaders as her party continued to expand its footprint across the country by inducting leaders from various parties, especially the Congress.