Didi at Jantar Mantar

has retired to his rural idyll. And the BJP,while patronising strange champions who pitched for this space — like Ramdev — has expressed only a fitful conviction that the party can ever own it,even by proxy.

Now that Banerjee has taken the unusual step of temporarily suspending her commitments as chief minister and leading a street protest in order to pick up the baton from these worthies,she would do well to consider why none of them have succeeded in carrying it very far. They have remained trapped in the ambit of the issues they canvassed public attention with,which are actually no more than ill-thought out demands. Hazare stands for a version of the Lok Pal,and Ramdev and the BJP are focused on money stashed overseas. None of them,not even the national party,offers anything like an agenda broad enough to be read as political,or to propel the sweeping changes in the fortunes of the poor and the persecuted that they lavishly promise.

Basically,these entities have been brought to prominence not on the strength of their agendas,but by the implosion of the opposition,which has left a vacuum that anyone in search of a national profile can try to fill. The Left began its slide into irrelevance by daring the UPA over the Indo-US nuclear deal,an issue that the common man,whose concerns it claimed to champion,did not care about. The BJP is now reduced to calling for an early election,without even the bare bones of a manifesto. Within Parliament,it prefers to stall the House for fear that it could have to make commitments if it allowed it to function. The civil society movements have overreached and lost their way. Banerjee’s chances are no better than theirs. This year,in a series of controversies that have erupted in her state,she has been exposed as shortsighted,autocratic and ill-advised. She can make a bid to reclaim her footing in Delhi only because the rest of the opposition isn’t faring much better.