Mamata Banerjee may be whimsical but she is not stupid. So, why is the Trinamool Congress leader pursuing the mirage of a Mahajot in West Bengal?

I know the numbers suggest that she might have something. Here is what happened in the 2001 Assembly elections. The Trinamool Congress won 30.66 per cent of the votes, the Congress got 7.98 per cent, and the BJP managed 5.19 per cent. That adds up to a very healthy 43.83 per cent, especially so when the CPI(M) toted up 36.59 per cent.

Of course, the CPI(M) had allies. Put together the CPI with its 1.79 per cent, the 5.65 per cent polled by the Forward Bloc, and the Revolutionary Socialist Party’s 3.43 per cent, and you get 47.46 per cent. On the other hand, the BJP, the Congress and the Trinamool Congress had barely any coordination. (The BJP contested 266 seats and the Trinamool Congress put up 226 candidates — all for a House with a strength of 294!) Who can say what might have happened had the three parties not fought each other as ferociously as they fought the CPI(M)?

Let us also accept that the sterling performance by the Left Front might have owed something to ‘‘engineering’’. The Communists have distributed roughly 8.15 crore ration cards in a state with a population of 8.02 crore! And the state government has just announced that it will be sending out 1.53 crore Below the Poverty Line (BPL) cards in the next two months. How many fraud voters does that make?

Taken at face value, these are damning admissions. Twenty-eight years of Left Front rule have created a state of affairs where one of eight people is starving. (That is what BPL means in India.) And everyone in the state needs ration cards for a square meal! The time is ripe for someone to cobble together a coalition to topple the CPI(M), right? Wrong!

Politics is about chemistry, not arithmetic. The WBCC has already announced that it cannot join hands with Mamata as long as she is with the BJP. This time, not just the chemistry but also the physics works against the Mahajot.

Assume for a moment that the Mahajot comes to be. Carrying forward this crazy hypothesis, imagine that it succeeds in sweeping the LF out of power. To quote the late Rajiv Gandhi, “When a big tree falls the earth shakes around it.” The tremors will be felt all the way up to Delhi.

Sonia Gandhi can shrug off a threat by H.D. Deve Gowda, whose Janata Dal (Secular) has a mere handful of seats, actually less, in Lok Sabha. But take away the three score seats commanded by the LF in Lok Sabha, and the Congress loses power. Anyone who believes the CPI(M) will turn the other cheek to a slap in the face in West Bengal is living in Cloud-Cuckoo Land.

I am sure there will be inevitable huffing and puffing over economic policy between the Congress and the CPI(M), not least given the looming Budget Session. But even if the Left Front gives way on, say, airports, there is no way it will cede an inch in West Bengal. (Nor in Kerala.) The Congress High Command knows the price of power in Delhi must be paid in hard political coin in Kolkata and Thiruvananthapuram.

Some might call it blackmail but let us be diplomatic and describe it as an exercise in physics. Upset the heavyweights on the Kolkata side of the swing, and the result will topple the Congressmen on the Delhi side. So, what incentive does the Congress have to join the proposed Mahajot?

That said, Mamata Banerjee is the principal leader of the Opposition in the state, and it is her duty to put up a good show. If that means holding a hand out to Pranab Mukherjee and Priya Ranjan Dasmunshi, so be it. Nevertheless, the Mahajot would probably fail even if Sonia Gandhi smiled upon it. The reason is that there is no Nitish Kumar in West Bengal.

Nitish Kumar upset the Laloo Prasad Yadav applecart because he convinced enough voters in Bihar that it wouldn’t just be business as usual in Patna. Can the Trinamool Congress, the Congress, or the BJP point to a single thing they would do differently in West Bengal? It is just the same old recipe, two parts populism to one part sentimental claptrap.

The sole West Bengal politician cut in the Nitish Kumar mould is Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee. The CPI(M) Chief Minister of West Bengal is trying to wake the state out of its Marxist torpor and into the 21st century, whether by giving the private sector its due, wooing foreign investment, or dampening the hartal culture. I am no admirer of the CPI(M), but I would vote for Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee were I in West Bengal.