DIDI NUMBER ONE
Playing unifier at the recent opposition rally, the feisty Mamata Banerjee wins the top slot fourth time in a row
DAYS AFTER SHE displayed her ability to be the main rallying point for opposition parties wanting to defeat the Narendra Modi government in the upcoming Lok Sabha election, West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee outperformed all her political rivals by emerging as the india today Mood of the Nation (MOTN) Poll’s Best Performing Chief Minister for the fourth time in a row.
From February 2016, when Mamata stood at 8 per cent, way below Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal and Bihar CM Nitish Kumar (then at 15 per cent each), she has dramatically climbed up to 14 per cent. At the number one slot, she is three percentage points clear of Uttar Pradesh CM Yogi Adityanath and Kejriwal—who are tied at 11 per cent. Mamata’s popularity at 64 per cent in West Bengal is second only to K. Chandrasekhar Rao who is at 78 per cent in his home state, Telangana.
As the president of the All India Trinamool Congress, the party with the second highest number of Lok Sabha MPs (38) after the Congress’s 48, Mamata is one of the top contenders for the prime minister’s post, should the mahagathbandhan emerge victorious in the Lok Sabha poll. Acceptable to several non-BJP, non-Congress leaders like
Kejriwal, KCR, National Conference’s Omar Abdullah and Samajwadi Party’s Akhilesh Yadav, Mamata, popularly known as ‘didi’, has emerged as a magnet for the mahagathbandhan. Her main rivals for the PM’s post are Congress president Rahul Gandhi and Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati. However, unlike Mamata, Mayawati does not have any MPs in the Lok Sabha.
On January 19, the feisty leader, with her battle cry, ‘Modi government’s expiry date is over’, hosted 26 leaders and 22 political parties, including the Congress, at a massive rally in Kolkata that attracted an estimated half a million people. Her admirers have described her frontal attack on PM Narendra Modi—when she declared, “Badal do, badal do, Delhi mein sarkar badal do (Change the government in Delhi)”—a masterstroke. The spirit of this slogan matches her party’s motto, ‘Maa, Mati, Manush’ (mother, motherland, people), which she had coined before the 2009 general election, and which, in 2011, helped her topple the Left Front government that had ruled West Bengal for 35 years.
While the second slot has been bagged by Yogi Adityanath and Kejriwal, Nitish, an important NDA ally, at 10 per cent, and Andhra Pradesh chief minister N. Chandrababu Naidu at 9 per cent hold the third and the fourth rank, respectively. While Naidu’s ratings have grown four percentage points from 5 per cent in February 2016, Nitish’s performance index has declined from number one position at 15 per cent in February 2016 to fourth rank in the current MOTN. Among Bihar’s voters, Nitish’s 55 per cent ratings take him down to the fifth position among all CMs. Naidu’s 63 per cent within Andhra Pradesh places him in the third slot along with Odisha chief minister Naveen Patnaik.
Given that the MOTN is a subjective survey of voter intention and preferences, the performance index is more a reflection of popularity ratings across India and within one’s home state rather than an index of governance. The fact that Nitish switched saddle from the UPA to the NDA in July 2017 may have contributed to his dwindling popularity at a time when the NDA’s graph is declining. Likewise, Naidu’s crossing over from the NDA to the UPA in 2018 when the latter is surging ahead may have helped his rising fortunes. In Mamata’s case, her consistent resistance to Modi can make her central to the mahagathbandhan arithmetic.