Mamata Banerjee rallying opposition forces against BJP

In the run-up to the 2021 Assembly election in West Bengal, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee had stated that the fight to oust the Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party government at the Centre would begin with the West Bengal election. In a fight that was largely perceived as a direct contest between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Mamata Banerjee, the West Bengal Chief Minister managed to puncture the saffron party’s claims of the invincibility of the duo of Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah and shattered the myth of the unstoppable BJP election juggernaut. Call to unity On July 21, amid outrage over the Pegasus issue in Parliament and across the nation, Mamata Banerjee chose to strike during her annual Martyrs’ Day speech, in which she called for a united opposition against the Modi government., P. Chidambaram and Digvijaya Singh from the Congress, Jaya Bachchan from the Samajwadi Party, Tiruchi Siva from the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, K. Keshav Rao from the Telangana Rashtra Samithi, Manoj Jha from the Rashtriya Janata Dal and Priyanka Chaturvedi from the Shiv Sena.) She had then said: “The Modi government has crossed its expiry date….the BJP’s achche din will not come back.” In 2019, too, the election campaigns of both the BJP and the Trinamool for the 42 seats in West Bengal ensured that the battle was perceived as a direct contest between Mamata Banerjee’s popularity and the ‘Modi factor’. On August 2, Abhishek Banerjee, for long considered Mamata Banerjee’s heir apparent, issued a challenge to the Tripura government, stating: “Write it down, in the next one and half years, Trinamool Congress will form the next government in Tripura.” Both Mamata Banerjee and Abhishek Banerjee have made no secret of their ambition to make Trinamool Congress a major political power beyond West Bengal, especially in the North-Eastern States such as Tripura, Manipur and Arunachal Pradesh.