Bhartiya Janata Party veteran Lal Krishna Advani credits"Reds themselves" for the collapse of the Marxist citadel in Kolkata
while stressing that Trinamul Congress chief and Railway Minister Mamata Bannerji served only as an instrument even while making "history."

He compares the development with the 1977 rout of Congress in the Lok Sabha elections and says late Jaya Prakash Narayan, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and late Morarji Desai were only instrumental as Mamata in West Bengal. "The roots of Congress downturn lay in the Emergency. If there had been no emergency there would have been no 1977," he says in his latest blog.

Advani goes on to point out that even in 1977, despite the Emergency, Congress won hands down in Andhra Pradesh that had to await one more election and the arrival of an N.T. Rama Rao to see the end of Congress Party’s hegemony in that State.

Referring to a Kolkata daily headlining Mamata's victory as "Queen of Calcutta, not of Bengal yet," he writes that she may well become that also. His advice to her is "not be impatient for an Assembly encounter earlier than scheduled" as "patience may pay her richer dividends."

"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 said in the blog titled "Left's crumbling citadel."

Stressing that "single-party dominance is an enemy of democracy," he said: "When the history of Indian Democracy is written, the names of all those who have contributed towards smashing this one-party hegemony either at the Centre or in the States will always be remembered."

Neither the erstwhile Jana Sangh leaders late Dr S P Mookerji nor late Deendayal Upadhyaya played any role in breaking the one-party hegemony, but they too figure in the list Advani gives. "This is a long list, which includes not only national stalwarts like Dr. S.P. Mookerji, Dr. Lohia, Deendayal Upadhyaya, Jaya Prakash Narayan and Atal Bihari Vajpayee but also leaders like C.N. Annadurai, M.G. Ramachandran and N.T. Rama Rao. I think that what Mamata Bannerji has done is also a significant contribution to the strengthening of democracy," says the blog.

As for the Left's crumbling citadel, Advani recalls collapse of the USSR, pointing out that the Americans by themselves could never have achieved the disappearance of the gigantic U.S.S.R. 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 U.K’s colonial dominance, the sun would never set on the Marxist empire!

"Not many soothsayers could have predicted how revolutionary 1989 would prove. This was the year that saw the Berlin Wall crumble, the U.S.S.R. disintegrate and the Cold War dramatically come to an end!"

Advani says the year 1989 also proved a turning point in national politics of India as the BJP which in 1984 could win only two Lok
Sabha seats made a spectacular leap forward and won 86 Lok Sabha seats and from then on, the party led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee, kept growing from strength to strength until in 1996 it outbeat the Congress and became the largest party in the Lok Sabha and dislodged the Congress from Delhi in 1998 to rule the large country for "six stable and fruitful years."