The West Bengal Congress is in the news these days. Not for any great electoral success or some such achievement but for having hit the streets after a long time. The arrest of the member of parliament from Baharampur, Adhir Chowdhury, has led to demonstrations in Calcutta and elsewhere and there is some show of unity among the state leaders of the party. As Subrata Mukherjee said, ?With the split with Mamata Banerjee, the party had lapsed into a moribund state. Now we have an issue which can rejuvenate the entire organization.?

Whether that will happen is for the future. Right now the statement has revealed two things. First, there is admission that the Congress found itself without teeth minus Banerjee. Second, it could not pick up any of the many lapses of the Left Front and turn it into an issue and had to wait for the arrest of a leader. From a long-term perspective, therein lies the weakness of the Congress.

And what is the issue at hand? Adhir Chowdhury was arrested on the charge of having a hand in two murders. It is a very serious charge and the MP should have surrendered immediately without daring the police to arrest him. Now the party is saying that the charge was cooked up, and in protest has taken to agitations against the Communist Party of India (Marxist). Actually, with two leaders being important ministers at the Centre, the party should have waited for the trial. But that perhaps would have been too responsible a step in a situation in which the first task obviously seemed to be to get the boys all worked up. Not an impressive decision if one were to go beyond street level politics.

Coming to the murders of the owner of an eatery and his son. The involvement of the MP was not suggested by the local CPI(M) leaders but by relatives of the two dead men. Three Congress legislators of the district, including Atish Sinha of Kandi, also share the same view and in the past, had also linked Chowdhury with various other unsavoury acts. And if one goes further back, Mamata Banerjee herself had the same man in mind when she had accused the Congress of associating with anti-social elements. So if the arrest was a Marxist conspiracy, then non-Marxists have also been a party to a ?general conspiracy? against him. The Congress, of course, cannot be expected to remember what Mamata Banerjee had said or to attach any importance to the words of Sinha and his group. The latter indeed are now being threatened with disciplinary action for staying away from the agitations.

This puts a question mark on the impact of the agitation. Sure, ordinary party members are happy at this opportunity to run berserk, but what about the people at large? The whole point of the agitation being votes, does the Congress really believe that this will bring them dividends? The whole programme may boomerang on them and once again thwart their attempts to emerge as the largest opposition party in the state which right now is their real objective. Even if it is accepted that the current agitation has really rejuvenated Congress workers across the length and breadth of West Bengal, such rejuvenation does not necessarily mean that voters will now be inspired to discard the ?flower? and opt for the ?hand?.

And even if that happens to any noticeable measure, the really happy party will be the CPI(M). particularly in south Bengal where the Marxists and their allies would really love the Congress to eat into Trinamool votes. This may well mean a few additional seats for the Left Front.

Right now, however, that seems unlikely. The bulk of the undivided Congress organization is with Mamata Banerjee and appears set to remain so. A strong indication of this was provided by the Calcutta civic polls results. In the recent Lok Sabha by-poll at Asansol, the Congress candidate lost his deposit. Is this trend going to be totally reversed by the arrest of an individual? In 1977, the ham-handed efforts by Charan Singh to arrest Indira Gandhi had acted as a shot in the arm for a shell-shocked Congress. But Adhir Chowdhury is no Indira Gandhi. The charge against him is murder and the ordinary voter will surely keep that in mind.

The problem with the two main opposition parties in the state is that they refuse to face the reality. In the last three decades, the CPI(M) and its allies have built a support base not on empty slogans but by allowing economics to be in command. If the number of party members and members of frontal organizations is taken into account, then the opposition really does not stand much chance. And it is not just numbers alone. The members and supporters include such base-level opinion-makers as teachers and lawyers.

If the Congress and the Trinamool Congress had really been serious about taking on the Marxists, they should have built up their own organizations from the village level. That would have effectively led to a rejuvenated opposition gaining the confidence of the masses. No matter how enthused Subrata Mukherjee may be, the rejuvenation of today can be only temporary in nature unless backed by the people. And where are the people? Where are the peasants whom Mamata Banerjee sought to rouse with gimmicks over the Salim project? The two parties would do well to realize that a well laid out political programme cannot be challenged with gimmicks.

The Congress has a further problem, right now, a problem of image. The Volcker report and its aftermath seem to suggest that there is more than meets the eye. Nothing may ultimately be proved, but the suspicion will persist as it did in the Bofors case, and that did not really help the party. In fact, the West Bengal unit should be grateful to the leftists for not going to town with Volcker as they had done with Bofors. But nobody can say for sure that they will not do so in the days to come and link the issue to the agitation over the arrest of a man suspected to have committed a heinous crime. The Congress image will then take a severe beating.

The assembly elections are still some months away and in the intervening period, the state may well once again be a witness to the age-old spectacle of Congressmen playing ?we are together, no we are not?. Of course, as in the past, when the election is finally held, the party will put up a united effort, as it always does. Die-hard Congress supporters may hope that the Priya Ranjan Das Munshi-Subrata Mukherjee duo will see the party through, but right now that appears to be a pipe dream. What they had achieved in the early Seventies was done with administrative support which is not around at present. The real interest is in finding out whether the two can help their party upstage the Trinamool Congress for the second spot. That itself should earn Das Munshi and Pranab Mukherjee a few points at 10 Janpath Road.