The two TMCs are, of course, the Tamil Maanila Congress and the Trinamool Congress. I refused to join the first but was briefly a founder-member of the second. Both are back in the news with the two states in which they operate, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal, heading for state assembly elections next April. Both are breakaways from the parent Congress, both an assertion of state autonomy over high command control, both survive on alliances, and both pretend to being the 'real' Congress as opposed to the ersatz Delhi-based version. Ultimately, both are an attempt to secure a Congress destiny outside the Congress. The Tamil Maanila Congress was the first off the block. Against the overwhelming opinion in the Tamil Nadu Congress committee that the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam had forfeited public confidence, the Congress high command decided on the eve of the 1996 general elections (which also involved state assembly elections in Tamil Nadu) to stay with the AIADMK alliance. At this, the bulk of the TNCC, led by veteran Tamil Nadu Congressman, G.K. Moopanar, broke from the parent party to form the Tamil Nadu version of the TMC. In itself, the break was unexceptionable and a deserved rebuke to the high command for misassessing the ground realities in the state. What was morally unacceptable was that instead of fighting the two Dravidian parties as a third force, the TMC went from birth to wedlock within minutes, tying up with the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, whose government the Congress had succeeded in persuading the then prime minister, Chandra Shekhar, to dismiss in January 1991 after producing irrefutable evidence of the organic links in organized violence between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and the DMK, specifically the complicity of chief minister, Muthuvel Karunanidhi, in the escape from India of the assassins of Padmanabha and 12 other Sri Lankan Tamil refugees in Chennai. After the dismissal of the DMK government, the same Sivarasan ('One-eyed Jack') who had led the Padmanabha assassination squad, and escaped the Tamil Nadu police dragnet on the explicit instructions of the chief minister, Karunanidhi, returned to India with Dhanu in tow and blew up Rajiv Gandhi (and 11 others) at Sriperumbudur. The Central Bureau of Investigation's multidisciplinary agency is even now engaged in investigating Karunanidhi, who, said the Jain commission, holds the key to unravelling the tangled conspiracy behind the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. Whatever its moral dimension, the TMC-DMK tie-up could hardly be faulted for its realpolitik: Moopanar emerged as the king-maker of the H.D. Deve Gowda and I.K. Gujral regimes; P. Chidambaram gained world renown; and the Congress was virtually wiped off the face of Tamil Nadu politics. Let us pause there and turn to the other TMC - the Trinamool Congress. West Bengal's TMC was, in effect, born at the Calcutta plenary session of the Congress in August 1997, when the then Congress president, Sitaram Kesri, distanced the party from an enormously successful rally organized by Mamata Banerjee to coincide with the plenary. With the precipitation of the fall of the Gujral government, Mamata's parting of ways with the Congress was also precipitated. On December 29, 1997, the West Bengal TMC was launched. I was present at the creation. The moral dilemma of the West Bengal TMC was the same as that of its Tamil counterpart. Neither had the strength to stand on its own. The one, throwing all discretion to the winds, jumped straight into the DMK bed. The other was more circumspect. Initially (through the four weeks I was with her), Mamata took the line that she was certainly not in alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party, not even in a seat-sharing arrangement with the party, and if there was any link between the two, it was only because the TMC's resources were limited to fighting 22 parliamentary seats. By the time the 1998 election results were out, Mamata had become a full-fledged supporter of the BJP's Atal Bihari Vajpayee and a member of the National Democratic Alliance, but still too coy to be part of the government. After the 1999 elections, the wheel had turned full circle and the Trinamool, as a member of the Central government, was wholly aligned to the BJP. The break between the Tamil TMC and the DMK came over the DMK's alliance with the BJP. By then, several things had become clear. One, the third front experiment at the Centre had failed and for political relevance the choice was between a BJP-led coalition and an anti-BJP grouping with the Congress as the largest single component. Second, the alliance with the DMK had served no TMC purpose in the 1998 Lok Sabha elections in which they had lost many of their seats. In 1999, the TMC chanced it on its own, and ended losing in 233 of Tamil Nadu's 234 assembly segments. To stay politically alive, Moopanar, from October 1999, positioned himself virtually in alliance with the till-then reviled J. Jayalalitha, but that alliance is still to be confirmed. Meanwhile, the Pattali Makkal Katchi - a professedly pro-LTTE, almost secessionist, party, which had notoriously celebrated the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, blatantly casteist and viciously anti-Dalit - jumped into the breach and confirmed its alliance with Jayalalitha. This has pushed the TMC back into the waiting arms of the Congress and the two are back to being virtually indistinguishable. If the Congress has discovered that there is no destiny for the Congress in Tamil Nadu except through a joint Congress-TMC presence, the TMC has discovered that a Congress destiny cannot be found outside the Congress. That stage is still to be reached in West Bengal. The denouement will probably have to wait till after the next state assembly elections. For the West Bengal Trinamool Congress in alliance with the BJP is as unacceptable to the Congress as the Tamil TMC was in cohorts with the DMK. Yes, there is an off-chance that Mamata will pull off a miracle victory. But the more likely outcome is a return of the Left Front, albeit cut considerably down to size. Mamata will then have to acknowledge to herself the reality that the Congress is a better bet for her in West Bengal, both morally and politically, than the BJP. As for the Congress, it probably already realizes that the tallest Congress leader in West Bengal is a young woman who is at present out of the Congress. Thus the stage is set for a post-election Trinamool Congress-Congress reconciliation. The aberrations of 1996 and 1997, in Tamil Nadu and West Bengal respectively, are thus more likely than not to come to a virtually simultaneous conclusion before the current year is out.