Modi-Didi bonhomie mystery - Saradha and other compulsions of both sides at play

Modi and Mamata at the IISCO programme earlier this month

Ashis Chakrabarti, TT Calcutta, May 24: This is the great - and as yet unsolved - mystery of Bengal politics today - what is behind the patch-up between Narendra Modi and Mamata Banerjee.

The timing makes it even more curious. As it begins the first anniversary celebrations, the Modi government makes a big thing about its "corruption-free" image. With one year to go for her bid for a second term, Mamata, on the other hand, battles serious corruption charges against her party and some of its senior leaders closest to her. And these are not all charges linked to the Saradha scam, the biggest ever in Bengal. So, how did the two opposites meet? More important, why?

Until the unexplained show of bonhomie, there was little love lost between the two. Never the one to care much about subtleties, Mamata pushed the point home by staying away not only from the first meeting of the Niti Aayog but also from a subsequent meeting between the Prime Minister and the chief ministers. And, she made daily attacks on Modi on letting the CBI loose on her party in the Saradha scam inquiry.

Earlier, during the 2014 election campaign, she had threatened to "handcuff" Modi, but that is easily explained as campaign-time excess.

What hasn't been explained by either side is what caused the sudden about-turn. It showed in the BJP and the Trinamul Congress coming together in Parliament and the two leaders publicly making a show of the coming together at the IISCO programme in Asansol. The icing on the cake was Babul Surpiyo symbolising the change in a ride in Mamata's car to a programme in Calcutta a few days later. No ordinary ride this, when you remember that the singer-turned-minister is believed to be a favourite of Modi's.

Eyebrows - and uneasy questions - were raised across the political spectrum at the nature, causes and consequences of this volte-face in the Modi-Mamata relationship. The Bengal BJP leadership was stumped - its hopes in the state can only die if the change is real. The CPM patted itself on the back - hadn't it always known of a "secret deal" between Modi and Mamata? Even within Trinamul, few knew what caused the "breakthrough" or how to react to it.

Of course, there have been pro forma attempts to explain away the change. Mamata herself said much the same thing that Arun Jaitley did yesterday - that the federal spirit required the Centre and the states to work together or that, at the political level, the BJP and Trinamul remained rivals in Bengal.

None of this convinced the political class or the people who were curious. If Mamata cared all that much about the "federal" governance, why did she boycott Modi all this time? Why then did she take potshots at the CPM chief minister of Tripura, Manik Sarkar, for inviting a visiting Modi to attend a cabinet meeting of the state government?

No, this isn't about Mamata suddenly waking up to the virtues of winning friends and influencing people, the doubters say. There is more to it, they claim, than meets the eye.

But few seem to know what that "more" is. Those who know would not spell it out. There are some obvious explanations, though. The Modi government is short of the numbers in the Rajya Sabha and so needs Trinamul's help in getting governments bills approved. The Centre had to deliver on the land boundary agreement with Bangladesh and could get it through only if Mamata obliged. The BJP's Assam unit too had reservations about the deal, but that was internal party matter that could be sorted out easily.

Understandable, but why should Mamata oblige Modi without something in return? Bengal's finances are said to be in a mess - in its four years, the Mamata Banerjee has borrowed from the market a lot more than the Left government did in such a short span. She needed help from Modi.

While the Modi-Mamata spat continued, the Centre had been close-fisted on some major grants such as the one for rural job schemes. This particular scheme is politically crucial - for a cash-starved government, it is the principal source for funding rural schemes and more important, for controlling rural votes. So this too could be a reason for Mamata bending.

But the real reason, say her political rivals, is none other than the Saradha scam. The Modi government has by now collected enough evidence against her party's direct links to the Saradha fraud. She knows that things could be very difficult for her if Modi decided to tighten the screws.

It is no coincidence that there has been a slowing of the CBI onslaught in the Saradha case in recent months, says Abdul Mannan, the Congress veteran who was one of the petitioners in the case in the Supreme Court that led to the CBI taking over the Saradha inquiry in the face of Mamata's opposition.

The man who is believed to have played a big role in linking the Saradha probe to the Modi-Mamata patch-up is simply not on the scene, at least publicly. Mukul Roy probably knows more than anybody else, other than Mamata, says Mannan, but he is waiting out his political reinstatement either in Trinamul or in some other party.

So where does all this lead in Bengal politics? It's almost certain that, as the next election draws near, Mamata will make another about-turn vis-a-vis Modi and the BJP. She has come to depend too heavily on Bengal's nearly 30 per cent Muslim vote to lose the community's vote by being seen to be too close to the Sangh parivar and its Prime Minister.

As for the BJP, a Modi-Mamata deal can only be a fatal blow to its hopes in Bengal. The civic polls have already showed that the party's appeal has shrunk dramatically since the heady days of the Modi wave of 2014.

Some even suggest that Modi has noted the poll results and decided that Mamata is a better bet for him in Bengal than his own party.

But then, the next Assembly elections in Bengal are a year away. Much may happen between now and then - involving Mamata, Saradha, Roy and other political players - to change things once again. Having been allies of both the BJP and the Congress before, Mamata knows that there are no permanent friends or enemies in politics.