ABHISHEK'S DAY OUT

It was a national debut of sorts for an emerging regional face, even if it amounted to nothing much more than a few hours of television-friendly drama at Rajghat that ended in a bout of jousting with the beefy gendarmes of Delhi Police and the obligatory detention afterwards.

- Arkamoy Datta Majumdar

The Trinamool Congress (TMC) had a major grouse against the Centre-the Narendra Modi government, it said, had unfairly frozen West Bengal's share of funds under key central schemes.

Hounded back home by the central agencies on a string of corruption cases, it had decided to take the battle of wits to the national stage. And it chose as its protagonist none other than Abhishek Banerjee, the 35-year-old nephew of West Bengal CM and TMC supremo Mamata Banerjee, the party's national general secretary and indeed one of the personages in the crosshairs of the agencies. Originally, Mamata was to lead the two-day protests in Delhi herself, but doctors had prescribed her rest for an old leg injury. So, as she kept an observant eye on proceedings from Kolkata, Abhishek did the honours at Rajghat, the chosen venue for the October 2-3 protests, along with a voluble posse of party MPs, MLAs as well as zilla parishad and panchayat samiti chiefs. Because the frozen funds related to the high-profile Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana-Grameen and suchlike, they sought an appointment with Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti, the Union minister of state for rural development, at Krishi Bhavan. Denied an audience, they duly went on to enact all the sacred rituals of agitprop.