ABHISHEK SPREADS HIS WINGS

Named TMC's leader in the Lok Sabha, Abhishek Banerjee emerges as the undisputed bearer of Mamata's mantle. Before him now lies the challenge of the assembly election next year

- By ARKAMOY DATTA MAJUMDAR

It's quite in tradition for the Bengali imagination to coin catchy limerick-like slogans that rhyme native words with English. But the latest one that's flooding social media timelines looks set to have a long shelf life—even in its zestful goofiness, it snaps up an entire zeitgeist, at least within the ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC). “Akashey batasey positive energy /Naam ta mone achhe na: Abhishek Banerjee,” it goes. Yes, the air seems charged with positive energy, and party faithful do attribute a lot of it to the 37-year-old nephew of Mamata Banerjee, the anointed inheritor. Usually taciturn with the media, he's razor-sharp when he allows himself an occasional sound bite, and bitingly sarcastic when speaking from the Opposition benches in the Lok Sabha, where he now fronts a young and very audible TMC contingent. He also knows how to carry an aura around himself. Not a scion's glamour inherited for free, but the hard-earned halo of authority of one who has fought, and won, in the toxic dust-laden battlefields of Bengal. Some of it, they say, were even internal to the TMC.

At any rate, the party's gritty holding of turf in the 2021 assembly election, as well as the coup de grace it delivered to the BJP in 2024, both partly owed to his strategic cunning. Take the LS poll. Even in early 2023, he had realised the Bengal countryside was simmering with discontent and that it could prove costly. He soon channeled those energies into TMC protests demanding the release of NREGA funds blocked by the Centre. He scaled that up with a delegation in Delhi that October. His narrative of central neglect ended up drowning the original allegation of pilferage of funds. It delivered in the summer of 2024, when the TMC took 29 of the state's 42 seats, short-circuiting the BJP. So, it's with measured steps that he fills the shoes of Future Supremo, beyond his triple role as TMC national general secretary, Diamond Harbour MP and the new one of leader in the Lok Sabha.