It was a spectacular expression of political solidarity that Kolkata witnessed on Friday afternoon, when the Congress, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), and sundry other Left parties marched in procession through the city’s arterial roads to articulate their concerted protest over the essay towards a redefinition of citizenship, 72 years after Partition.

The other critical development, one that chimed perfectly with the show of unity, was the Chief Minister’s announcement that the West Bengal government would never put in place “detention camps”, as in Assam. Nor for that matter will it undertake work on the National Register of Citizens, as dictated by the likes of the feisty Amit Shah.

Indubitably, this has been a robust response on the part of Mamata Banerjee to the Centre’s forbidding challenge. She has also deprecated the contrived bickering within various class groups ~ Matuas, Namasudras, Scheduled Castes, and Scheduled Tribes. Furthermore, if a person has the right to vote at the age of 18, on a party of reasoning he/she also reserves the democratic right to protest if the reason is sufficiently cogent.

A crackdown on such a protest verges on suppression of dissent, of a kind that historian Ramachandra Guha suffered in Bengaluru a week ago, let alone the brutal police mobilisation at Aligarh Muslim University and Jamia Millia Islamia, which the distinguished historian, Irfan Habib (Aligarh school), has described as “worse than in colonial times”.

Friday’s Left-Congress march recalled Mr Jyoti Basu’s consistent appeal to his party to align with the Congress to keep the BJP at bay. He knew his onions better than some of his comrades… a generation younger. It would be useful to recall that the CPI-M had to pay dearly for abjuring a tie-up with the Congress in the elections ~ Assembly and Lok Sabha ~ since 2011. Incredible as it may sound but nonetheless is true, the party that ruled Bengal for 34 years has been rendered a virtual non-entity in the last parliamentary election.

Arguably, the debacle would not have been so total in the event of an electoral alliance with the Congress. It would be premature to speculate just yet whether the two parties will forge an alliance or understanding before the next Assemby election in 2021, or at any rate ahead of the panchayat polls next year. Suffice it to submit that the two parties have signalled their intent to fight the Bharatiya Janata Party unitedly in 2021.

Both parties have registered a remarkable degree of forward movement with their pledge to hold what they call “political events” jointly in West Bengal. Beyond the immediate perspective of the citizenship legislation, the coming together over a terribly emotive issue is of tremendous political significance. Having said that, it is fervently to be hoped that both the Left and the Congress will discard the antediluvian agitprop, exemplified by the scheduled bandh on 8 January.