Ahead of TMC’s campaign launch today, Mamata stands lonesome, unlike 2019

There will be a distinctly different feel to the Trinamool Congress (TMC) rally at Kolkata’s Brigade Parade Ground this Sunday, from where Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and her nephew Abhishek Banerjee are all set to launch their Lok Sabha campaign. Unlike the upbeat and assertive rally five years ago at the same historic grounds, there is an undercurrent of apprehension in the party ranks heading into the ‘Jana Garjan Sabha (People’s Roar Rally)’.

And the reason is not difficult to fathom. In 2019, neither was the ruling party in the state weighed down by as much anti-incumbency, nor were its mountain of woes this high, including cascading charges of corruption and the Sandeshkhali embarrassment.

Thus far, there is no confirmation of any national opposition leader being present at the rally, unlike in 2019. The party has been highlighting its own “national” faces who will be present on the dais to drum up excitement — including Ripun Bora, Sushmita Dev, Mukul Sangma, Lalitesh and Rajesh Tripathi, Kirti Azad, Shatrughan Sinha, Saket Gokhale and its latest new MP, Sagarika Ghose.

In 2019, the TMC had marked its election campaign launch on January 19 in the presence of nearly 20 national-level opposition leaders, including the Aam Aadmi Party’s Arvind Kejriwal, the TDP’s Chandrababu Naidu, the JD(S)’s H D Kumaraswamy and H D Deve Gowda, the National Conference’s Farooq and Omar Abdullah, the Samajwadi Party’s Akhilesh Yadav, the DMK’s M K Stalin, the RJD’s Tejashwi Yadav, along with senior Congress leaders Mallikarjun Kharge and Abhishek Manu Singhvi, who were said to be standing in for then Congress president Rahul Gandhi and his mother Sonia Gandhi.

Buoyed by the endorsement and the seemingly common front by the Opposition,