Be patient, you can rule W Bengal, Advani tells Mamata

BJP leader L K Advani on Saturday advised Trinamool Congress Chief Mamata Banerjee not to seek early Assembly elections in West Bengal after her party's victory in the urban civic polls and suggested that patience would pay richer dividends.

In his latest blog, Advani said that by this victory Banerjee had created history and reports stating that she may rule over Bengal may turn out to be true in future.

"She may well become that (Queen of Bengal) also; she need not be impatient for an Assembly encounter earlier than scheduled. Patience may pay her richer dividends," he said, referring to a newspaper headline, "Queen of Calcutta, Not of Bengal yet".

However, Advani credited Banerjee's victory to alienation of people by the Left parties more than her performance.

"If the Marxist citadel of Kolkata has collapsed, Mamata has served only as an instrument. The real achievement is of the Reds themselves. The 'achievement' is negative: 'alienation' from the people, as Prakash Karat has rightly commented," Advani wrote.

He equated this to the larger US versus USSR tussle of the Cold War era.

"Americans by themselves could never have achieved the disappearance of the gigantic USSR empire. An unending series of Stalinist excesses, of Hungarys and Czechoslovakias, and a growing arrogance that it was only a matter of time before, as used to be the British boast in the days of UK's colonial dominance, the sun would never set on the Marxist empire," he said.

Advani reminisced that 1989 was a landmark year as it saw the fall of the Berlin Wall, collapse of USSR and end of Cold War.

In India, the same year saw BJP end single-party dominance, which Advani claims is "an enemy of democracy".

"I hold that the year 1989 enabled the BJP to lay the foundation of the biggest achievement of its life – conversion of India's single-dominant-party polity into a bi-polar polity!" Advani said.