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Mamata may visit party MP,
and PM, in Bombay

Trinamul Congress chief Mamata Banerjee has a readymade excuse to visit Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, recovering from a knee surgery in Bombay despite his caveat that central ministers and leaders of the National Democratic Alliance should visit him only when he returns to Delhi.

An associate of Mamata in the Trinamul office told rediff.com that party parliamentarian from Jadavpur constituency in Calcutta, Krishna Bose, would also undergo surgery in Bombay by surgeon Dr Chittaranjan Ranawat, who on Thursday successfully operated on Vajpayee's right knee.

Ranawat indicated that he would be performing approximately 20 operations during his Bombay visit.

Bose has been a key interlocutor for her party's proposed return to the NDA, after Mamata withdrew from the ruling alliance at the Centre and concluded a pact with the Congress in West Bengal, before the recent assembly elections.

Bose, along with party parliamentarians Bikram Sarkar, Nitish Sengupta and Ranjit Kumar Panja had counselled Mamata that the Trinamul's return to the NDA was the best course for its political prospects in view of a hostile Left Front and an equally hostile Congress unit in West Bengal.

The Trinamul chief has been compelled to give a patient hearing to the pleas of her party MPs, who have indicated that her failure to listen to their entreaties was likely to result in a split in the party, with most joining the NDA.

The Trinamul's decisive defeat by the Left Front in West Bengal, coupled with the latent hostility between its party members and those of the Congress, has apparently spoilt Mamata's political gameplan.

Her party parliamentarians are clamouring for the Trinamul's return to the NDA.

Mamata, on her part, is discreetly negotiating with the BJP leadership for her party's return to the NDA fold. But her emissary Dinesh Trivedi, a party activist who went to broach the issue of the Trinamul's return, had been snubbed by BJP general secretary in charge of West Bengal Kailashpati Mishra.

Mishra curtly told him that "Mamata has grown too big for her boots. She should mind her own business", BJP sources pointed out.

Although a section of the BJP leadership is opposed to the Trinamul's return to the NDA, the prime minister's emissary Sudheendra Kulkarni, on Vajpayee's instructions, has not abandoned efforts to make the Trinamul an NDA alliance partner once again.

However, the Trinamul official did not confirm whether Mamata would head for Bombay, to visit Bose, when she is operated by Dr Ranawat.

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