Are Bengal's Dada-Didi riding into sunset?

Kolkata, Oct 6: The last few months have been riding a roughshod for the 'Dada' and 'Didi' of Bengal as they fight for Nirvana in the face of absolution.

Strange are the fates of two of the most talked about figures of the state. For Mamata Banerjee it has been a rise to form the face of the alternative power in the red bastion, and for Sourav Ganguly it has been ruling the cricket world for six years, before both had a 'great fall'.

Mamata Banerjee's claim to fame was her firebrand character and straight talk in the face of an exalted and deep-rooted ruling faction. She had a meteoric rise riding the sympathy wave in 1984 general elections when Rajiv Gandhi, a political greenhorn then, swept to power after his mother Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was shot dead.

But her desertion from Congress, forming of a new party and shuffling of alliances between BJP and Congress and repeated resigning from posts in Lok Sabha, has left her as a whimsical leader with no political focus. The general consensus is that Ms Banerjee means good, but does not know how.

If the rise was like a shooting star, the burnout was inevitable.

And 20 years later in 2004 Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool Congress ended up with one seat in the general elections.

Two years later she was reduced to barely the leading opposition winning only 30 seats in the 2006 assembly polls, a fall from the sixty plus seats from the last state elections.

And yesterday after deciding to reduce the Bangla Bandh from 24 hours to 12, she had made a climbdown or rather a compromise with her fate, as the bugles of a truce is sounding large and strong.

For the last few months Mamata Banerjee did not have an issue at hand as the Left Front leadership under Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee was quick to admit faults and ready to make amends.

Singur Tata Project threw a lifeline to Ms Banerjee and she hung on to it feeding life from the tussle between the agrarian and industrial policies.

But the all party meet virtually sounded a death knell for Trinamool Congress, she had formed breaking away from Congress in 1997.

Mr Bhattacharjee had held out an olive branch calling an all-party meeting to discuss the misgivings of Opposition and it turned out to be a success.

Now 'Didi', and her close aides needed an honourable excuse to beat a hasty retreat.

Earlier, the Trinamool had demanded that the chief minister ''publicly'' apologise for the police action against its leader Mamata Banerjee and party workers during a demonstration at Singur on September 25 against the land acquisition for the project.

To make matters worse even as Mamata Banerjee took up the cudgels for farmers in Singur, they file up before the government agents issuing cheques for the land acquired. While several have collected theirs, the rest would do so as the payment resumes next week.

Now the Left Front, couched an order in the garb of a request, when they urged the Trinamool to withdraw its call for a 24 hour 'Bangla Bandh' on October nine as it would hinder relief work for thousands of people affected by floods in the state.

Didi was now faced with a greater cause of humanity and instant need for relief against calling a bandh to protest police 'atrocity'. Didi took an honourable middle-path and fell in line with another fringe party in the state SUCI.

So what does Trinamool Congress fight with or for. Their causes have dwindled over a period of time and the last hustings have proved that the 'new and improved' Left Front is the face of progressive West Bengal.

It is not difficult to fathom Mamata's compulsions behind the climbdown. She would be loath to project Trinamool as a party opposed to industrialisation.

Besides, it may lead to further desertion of her urban middle-class vote bank, a trend witnessed in the last Assembly election. She also seems to have miscalculated how farmers in Singur judged the whole issue. So the October nine bandh is still on.

The pitch looks queer than ever before for Mamata Banerjee.

And its the pitch and toss of the cherry on a flat track at Chennai that has left Sourav Ganguly with no wind in the sail.

When Dada took over the captaincy in post match-fixing exposes in 2000, he quickly proved to be a tough,imaginative and uncompromising skipper. India began winning, culminating it to the World Cup final in South Africa. A victory in Pakistan turned him into a cult figure, but the wheel had turned full circle by then for the Bengal southpaw.

The beginning of the end came in 2004 at Nagpur, when his last-minute withdrawal, helped Australia conquer Steve Waugh's 'final frontier'. The final snap came in the public spat between him and Greg Chappel. His gritty 30-plus in Karachi last year notwithstanding, he was henceforth left out in the cold. With 15000 runs in his bag combining both versions of the game and also his ability to cream the off-side was not enough for a recall.

Perhaps the final nail in the coffin was struck in the Challengers Trophy. Only 3 runs from 10 balls into the second match saw an angled bat outside off redirecting the ball back onto the stumps and suddenly the question surrounding Ganguly changed.

It was now not about whether he could make a comeback to the Indian squad, but whether he still deserved a place in the Rest of India team for Irani Trophy starting October 9. Yesterday, he did not find a place.

Scores of 24 and three against pacers on a flat pitch where Robin Uthappa, Gautam Gambhir, Parthiv Patel and Dinesh Karthik raised a storm, did not help Ganguly's cause either.

A former national selector Sambaran Banerjee told UNI, ''It's sad.

But then performance has no alternative.'' Being left out of the Irani Trophy meant Chief National Selector Dilip Vengsarkar was sticking to his words that neither name nor a history of big runs would matter, unless the player was in form at present.

But it also meant that Ganguly will now have to depend on the other domestic matches and put up some tall scores in succession to make a bid. In addition India has to perform below par at the Champions' Trophy and the South African series, which is not expected in the first place.

His lack of form hurt like a nail from the old shoe and it refused to leave him, no matter how much mending is being done at the nets. Besides, his tirade against former BCCI Chief Jagmohan Dalmiya has earned him the dubious name of 'ungrateful' among his fanfollowing.

So if before the Challengers the doors looked half open for the most successful Indian skipper, it looks half closed now.

Nobody knows if a U-turn awaits either of the icons, but for now they look ragged and tired in the face of a relentless, uncompromising and immensely successful opposition.

UNI