Congress General Secretary in-charge of Communications, Jairam Ramesh (File).
The Congress "cannot imagine the INDIA bloc without Mamataji", party spokesperson Jairam Ramesh said Wednesday afternoon, minutes after Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said her Trinamool Congress would contest the Lok Sabha election in Bengal on its own, apparently ending all hopes of a seat-sharing deal between the two parties.
Mr Ramesh's firefighting efforts also included an outreach over Rahul Gandhi's 'Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra, which is due to enter Bengal Thursday but skip state capital Kolkata and Ms Banerjee, who expressed displeasure because the Congress "did not have courtesy to inform me (they are coming to my state)".
"Rahul Gandhi has clearly said Mamata Banerjee and Trinamool are very strong pillars of the INDIA alliance. We cannot imagine the INDIA alliance without Mamataji..." Mr Ramesh said.
"Mamata Banerjee has said we want to defeat BJP. We will do anything to defeat the BJP..." he added.
On Ms Banerjee's response to the Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra travelling through Bengal, he said, "Congress President (Mallikarjun Kharge) has announced that all INDIA parties are invited to join..."
Minutes earlier Ms Banerjee said, "I had no discussions with the Congress. I have always said that in Bengal, we will fight alone. I gave them (the Congress) many proposals... but they rejected them."
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The Trinamool and the Congress have bickered for weeks over seat-sharing arrangements for the Lok Sabha poll in Bengal, with neither side ready to back down.
The Congress wants 10-12 of the state's 42 seats. The Trinamool is offering only two. The offer is understood to reflect the Congress' poor showing in the last two elections; the party won four seats in 2014 and only two in 2019. The Trinamool's Kunal Ghosh has warned against "unjustified bargaining".
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Amidst this back and forth, Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, the Congress' state boss and who is fiercely opposed to sharing seats, has repeatedly attacked Ms Banerjee. He responded to the offer by declaring she owed her success to the Congress' "mercy".
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Rahul Gandhi, asked about these attacks, played them down, insisting "Mamata Banerjee is very close to me and our party" and that it is "natural", sometimes, for the two sides to criticise each other. "But they are not going to disrupt the relations between the Congress and the TMC," he insisted.
Ms Banerjee is one of the few opposition leaders to have enjoyed electoral success against the BJP in recent years, after orchestrating a statement win over the saffron party in the last Assembly election.
In 2019 too she ensured her party had an edge, winning 22 seats. That, though, was less than the 34 from five years ago. Ominously, BJP went from two to 18.
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