Moitra was quick to put a lid on a narrative that had been running wild about her comments on Adhikari. She called the piece of the interview that went around “cherry-picked” and charged that some in the party were out to misrepresent what was said. The MP was firm: she wasn’t heaping praise on a rival. Her words, she says, were about the past, and she has no trouble with calling those who dissent from within traitors.
Why a short clip made for a big row
It started when a prominent commentator put out a small part of Moitra’s interview, making it seem like her line on Adhikari had mellowed. The way it was put forward, you could be forgiven for thinking Adhikari was being put on a pedestal.
Not so, says Moitra. She asked people to listen to the whole of it, not just the soundbite. “Suvendu is no angel,” she put it simply. But at the same time, he had the spine to walk away and run on an opposition ticket, something you don’t see from the ones who work to subvert things from the inside.
She made it clear there was a professional rapport with him back in the day. But as for now? She hasn’t been in touch with him since 2020, when he left the fold.
Past ties, present faultlines
Some of what came out in the interview was to put her memories in perspective. Take 2014: after she was turned down for a Lok Sabha ticket, she was in tears all night and it was Adhikari who put her at ease.
Or her first foray into an assembly race in Karimpur in 2016. Adhikari was the only one of the old guard to show up for her first rally. These are facts of an earlier time, she says, not an endorsement of where he is today.
Then she put his departure side by side with the kind of infighting you see in the TMC these days. In her view, those who have left have made their bed; the ones who are causing trouble from the inside are on another level.
What Moitra says she did and did not say
To put an end to the guesswork, here is how Moitra puts it, for the record:
– You’re seeing a snippet, not the interview
– I don’t vouch for Suvendu. He is no saint
– Those looking to tear the party apart are traitors
Rebellion reshapes the battlefield
All this is happening while the TMC is in the middle of some rough patching. In the Lok Sabha, 20 of their MPs have banded together with the NCPI to form their own group. Three in the Rajya Sabha have already put in their papers.
Abhishek Banerjee even put pen to paper on 10 June to tell the Speaker of the House to let no breakaway faction of the All India Trinamool Congress be recognised. The leadership’s take is that the dissidents have no standing.
Down in the West Bengal Assembly, things have been no less heated. There was a ruckus over a letter with what were said to be fake signatures to make Sobhandeb Chattopadhyay the Leader of Opposition. On 3 June, they made it official with Ritabrata Banerjee, who had the backing of 58 of the 80 TMC MLAs. The courts will have the final say.
A word to the room
With defections on the rise, Moitra’s point is to draw a line in the sand for the cadre and the fence-sitters alike. By underlining that Adhikari made his move and is now a rival, she is making a distinction with the ones who are chipping away at the party from the inside.
And as for a union with the Congress? Don’t count on it. She sees where the ideologies may meet, but the reports are without merit.
She also has some thoughts on how different organisations are built. The BJP is run by its cadre, the TMC by its leaders. It’s a comparison that has some resonance given the spats and walkouts we’ve seen.
What comes next
You can see how a few seconds of audio can fan the flames in a party that is already feeling the heat. For Moitra, the play is to put things in context, stand by the top, and put the rebels in their place.
Will it make a dent in the turnover? Hard to tell. But the TMC’s path forward, and how they deal with the push and pull from both sides, will set the tone for the politics of West Bengal in the wake of the BJP’s state election win.
