The Congress may have allegedly turned down the Trinamool Congress’s offer for a truce in Goa, but it would turn around and hold the hands of the TMC after the results of the state elections are declared on May 10 if it is serious about keeping the Bharatiya Janata Party at bay. Or so feels Trinamool parliamentarian and the party’s Goa state incharge Mahua Moitra.
“We have no enmity with the Congress and have the greatest respect for the Congress president. At the end of the day, we are all products of the Congress. Mamata Banerjee too has come out of the Congress. There’s no denying that the Congress is the mother party of most parties today. The Congress is not our enemy. But that does not mean it can take us for granted and treat us like second-class citizens,” Moitra said during an exclusive interview to CNN-News18, less than a day after her party’s national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee stated that “one vote to the Congress in Goa would mean one vote to the BJP”.
“We are fine with the political reality that if the Congress doesn’t want to talk to us before the elections, it will have to do that talking after the election results are out. There are no two ways about it,” Moitra added.
Fiercely defending in her characteristic manner the Trinamool Congress’s political stand on the largely disunited opposition space in Goa, Moitra said, “We left 10 seats for the MGP and Congress left two for Goa Forward Party. There were still 28 seats on the table and we said let’s sit and find some kind of arrangement to maximise anti-BJP votes. Is that opposition disunity? No. It is political maturity. It is good sense. We reached out to the Congress and conveyed this. But the Congress is now caught in its own world of obfuscations. They said they would get back to us in two weeks. They didn’t and we have moved on.”
Reluctant to call that move a good one or bad, Moitra asserted, “Sometimes we need to do things that are necessary to go forward and reshape something. It is not always pleasant, but that’s what is required for something new to emerge.”
Moitra was referring to her party’s assessment about the Congress’s performance in Goa where it failed to hold on to the people’s mandate in the previous elections on account of large-scale defections to the BJP.
“The BJP is ruling Goa not because of its own strength but on account of the strength of the Congress MLAs. If you were the TMC and you had decided to not let the BJP rule India any more, would you sit back and wait for the Congress to again botch it up spectacularly? Or would you decide that the state is crying out for a change, given there’s no difference now between the Congress and BJP, and act accordingly?” she said.
Asked whether the aggression in the Trinamool campaign against the BJP and Congress alike is healthy for the opposition space in Goa, Moitra said, “Aggression is in our DNA and we seek no apologies for it. In India, we need conviction politicians, not consensus politicians. We can’t do adjustment politics as the Congress did with the Left all the time when it held power in Delhi, which was one of the reasons I quit the Congress. Aggression has worked in Bengal and it will work in Goa. The Congress may have different strengths in these two states but as we have witnessed in Bengal, it can get from top to minuscule position in less than five years and we are not going to sit there and watch.”
When told about the political feelers that Trinamool chief Mamata Banerjee is, reportedly, still sending to Congress president Sonia Gandhi for broad-based opposition unity against the BJP and how she reconciled that with the aggression strategy, Moitra said that the greater dialogue with the Congress for the 2024 general elections ought to continue.
As for the internal battles that Trinamool is reportedly already having to fight in its short four-month presence in the state, Moitra hoped the rough edges would get smoothened out in due course. Asked about the TMC’s ace candidate Luizinho Faleiro’s alleged disappointment with his seat, Moitra said, “Faleiro is a senior leader and a Rajya Sabha member. If the boss says you fight a particular seat, you do exactly that. We are not the Congress. We are a disciplined force and once we are a part of this army, whatever the general asks us to do, as lieutenants we do it.”
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