Mamata Banerjee’s spirits have been boosted by a decisive victory against Modi-Shah in the assembly elections. He fought the election sitting in a wheelchair. He has created an image of a fighter leader in the last 30 years. No doubt they are Street Fighter. Prashant Kishor has joined him from above, whose record of success in election management is amazing. Barring the SP-Congress alliance experiment in Uttar Pradesh alone, he has been successful in every state election from north to south and east to west. It can also be called their wisdom that they always bet on the winning horse. So, the pair of Mamta and Prashant Kishor is engaged in the arrangement to win Delhi.
But Mamata Banerjee is neither the first leader to have such ambition, nor is this effort the first. Remember how hard Chandrababu Naidu worked before the last Lok Sabha elections. When he was the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, his airplane engine also did not cool down. In the time when he was the convener of the NDA and had the capacity to form and spoil the government at the Center, then Mamata Banerjee was a small part of the NDA. Naidu was the convener of the NDA and Mamata was a minister in the same government. But today Chandrababu Naidu is lying in his state by loot. Before the last elections, Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao had also worked no less. He also ran a lot in Delhi and his ship kept flying from Chennai to Kolkata. He was also in the mood that he would make an alliance of opposition parties and become a leader.
How can anyone ignore the efforts of Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal like this! His ambition was bigger than that of Mamata Banerjee. In his very first attempt, he went to contest Varanasi election against Narendra Modi and fielded candidates on more than 400 seats. They cooled down when their candidates forfeited all but 15-20 seats. But after that he won in Delhi for two consecutive times. Before Mamata Banerjee, if any leader has given a decisive defeat to Narendra Modi and Amit Shah, it is Arvind Kejriwal. He hasn’t given up hope yet. Mamta Banerjee is now focusing only in Tripura and Goa, but Kejriwal and his party are spreading their legs from Punjab to Goa, Uttarakhand, Gujarat. It is also a coincidence that Prashant Kishor has also been his election strategist.
Among the leaders of regional identity, Sharad Pawar was the first leader who laid the board to become the Prime Minister. While in Congress, he attempted it independently. When Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated in the middle of the 1991 Lok Sabha elections, elections were postponed in almost half of the country. At that time Sharad Pawar had laid his cards. Cash money was then given to every Congress candidate contesting the remaining Lok Sabha seats, which was reported in the media in those days, it was Sharad Pawar’s enterprise. After the elections, the Congress government was formed but they could not succeed. His hatred for the Gandhi-Nehru family began to deepen from that time.
However, after the beginning of the era of coalition politics in the country, many regional leaders dreamed of becoming the Prime Minister. Both Lalu Prasad and Mulayam Singh Yadav made a big impact in Delhi. In the battle of both, the fate of HD Deve Gowda was revealed, who did not insist. The leader of Karnataka who was considered a contender for the post of Prime Minister was Ramakrishna Hegde. In the era of coalition politics, the Left leaders used to unite the opposition but when they had a chance to make their own prime minister and there was almost agreement on the name of Jyoti Basu, they backed down. Winston Churchill said after becoming the Prime Minister of Britain that he had been preparing and waiting for this moment all his life. There are very few leaders in India who have prepared and waited for their lifetime to become the Prime Minister. Among them the names of Chandrashekhar, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Narendra Modi can be taken.
