For the first time since the I.N.D.I.A (Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance) alliance was formed over two meetings of Opposition leaders in June and July this year, the West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee has criticized the Communist Party of India, Marxists (CPIM), once its chief political rival but now an alliance partner.

During a public meeting in Kolkata on August 21, Banerjee openly blamed the CPIM-backed student union of Jadavpur University for the unnatural death of a minor student in the boys’ hostel of the institute on the night of August 10. Apparently a victim of ragging, the first year student of Bengali was reportedly tortured before being thrown off the fourth four balcony of the boys’ hostel in which he was staying. She said, “What a situation prevails there. We used to be proud of Jadavpur University and still are. But the CPIM union killed a student there. They won’t change even after killing so many people and playing with blood for years”

Didi’s scathing remarks were reminiscent of her tirades against the then government run by the CPIM-led Left Front government. Before she came to power in 2011, in an Assembly election which she swept, Banerjee’s only political goal was to dethrone the CPIM from power. However, in the past decade, the Bharatiya Janata Party, which has been on a mission, since it came to power at the center in 2014, to expand and capture power in as many states as it can, has gradually left the CPIM behind to become chief rival.

The BJP’s huge gains in West Bengal – it went from only one seat in 2009 to eighteen in the Parliamentary polls of 2020 and from zero in 2011 to seventy-seven in the Assembly elections of 2021 – saw Mamata turn her full attention on the new political rival breathing down her neck. In fact, though initially Didi did not refrain from making the CPIM culpable for all the ills she inherited, including a less than vibrant economy, since BJP started to advance, she has even considered the possibility that working together with the Left parties cannot be ruled out. When the I.N.D.I.A alliance was formed, Didi wanted to make sure that among those she mentioned in her speech at the end of the meeting was that of Sitaram Yechuri, CPIM general secretary.

In the state, however, CPIM leaders categorically stated that the formation of the alliance at the center to try to dethrone the BJP government in the Parliamentary elections next year does not have any impact on the CPIM’s traditional rivalry with Trinamool in West Bengal. “It is not that CPIM has entered into an alliance with the Trinamool,” clarified CPIM leader Sujan Chakraborty in an interview with The Statesman. “The CPIM has joined an alliance which shares the goal of dethroning the BJP government and the Trinamool too happens to be a part of that alliance. That is all.”

Though the Trinamool has thus far largely steered clear of highlighting its rivalry with CPIM at the state level, Mamata’s comments yesterday corroborates the Bengal CPIM’s stance that status quo remains as far as the relationship between the two political parties in the state is concerned. The CPIM too has shot back claiming that not the Left parties but student unions backed by Trinamool is behind the incident which took place concerning the death of the student.

In the war of words between the political parties, the point to note is not so much the issue at hand but the fact of the rival.