Dear Express reader, At week’s end, came this news from West Bengal: Abhishek Banerjee, MP and nephew of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, has been named TMC’s national general secretary. The de facto Number 2 was appointed in TMC a month after it swept back to power for a third successive term, defeating the BJP which had made it a fight to the finish. By all accounts, the decision was taken after due process, or at least by observing a semblance of it, at a virtual meeting of the working committee attended by all newly elected party MLAs, chaired by Banerjee. Here it is again: TMC’s Number 2 is the nephew of its Number 1. We need to pause on this bit of news, even in these crowded corona times. Not because it is rare and unusual, but because it isn’t. Not because the inner lives of parties are entirely our business, but because what happens inside the back box of the political party affects and shapes the contours of the political battles outside. And because the lack of democracy within the party affects the credibility of its claim to be a democratising force in the polity. By fast-tracking and privileging a relative’s rise within the party, Banerjee has signalled that for all the vigour and energy with which she has opened up larger political possibilities by taking on the mighty BJP, within her party, she trusts only family. Like other regional party bosses such as Lalu Prasad, who gave the RJD a radical and vibrant politics and then presided over its shrinking into a family-led concern in Bihar. Like the national party, the Congress, the oldest party on the block which is still beset with an identity crisis because of the lines it has failed to draw between Party and Family. There is another reason why TMC’s new Number 2 matters outside TMC today. After its famous victory against the BJP, in a prestige battle in which the BJP had pulled out all the stops and made it Modi vs Banerjee, TMC is acquiring a larger profile, or a larger profile is being thrust on TMC. The general election is still three years away, and much politics lies in between, but from our vantage point today, it is possible to see TMC becoming the centrepiece of a coalition of regional parties against the Modi-BJP, with or without Congress. One of the many failures of “secular” parties that give ballast to the BJP’s electoral-political fortunes under Modi's leadership is nepotism. It is not that wives, sons and daughters or nieces and nephews are not being promoted in the BJP — it is only that at the top of the BJP is a politician who does a good job of making the fact that he is unencumbered by family into a selling point politically. The people who voted for the BJP because they wanted a way out of the status quo were also, and among other things, voting against parties that they had seen to be hijacked by the Leader’s Family. At this point, for TMC to elevate the Leader’s nephew as Number 2 doesn't just send out unhappy signals about the possibilities of inner party democracy. It may also be an unwise move for it strategically, if it has the ambition to take the battle to the BJP nationally. Or not. It may also turn out to be just a small unnoticed blip, lost in the bigger tumult caused by the virus in the polity. Till next week, Vandita | 
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