Her anti-CPI(M) agenda makes her popular in Left Front-weary West Bengal. But what exactly does Mamata Banerjee stand for?
November 25, 1992: Mamata Banerjee was invited by the West Bengal unit of the Youth Congress to a rally at Kolkata’s Brigade Parade Ground to launch a movement against the Communist Party of India (Marxist)’s long rule in the state. The crowd that attended was impressive and it cheered her enthusiastically as she proceeded to sound the symbolic “death knell” of the state government from the dais.
This support moved her so much that she announced, then and there, that she would quit her post as junior minister in the Narasimha Rao government (she was in charge of youth affairs and sports) and devote her energies full-time to building an anti-Left Front movement.
Rao was, naturally, livid that a junior minister had put him in an embarrassing position by making a public announcement before informing him of her decision. Banerjee, true to form, could not have cared less. In over a decade of street politics in Kolkata, she had already developed an instinctive understanding of the realities of power politics that would enable her to grow from strength to strength despite increasingly maverick behaviour.
In any case, that dramatic public announcement came to nothing; she did not resign from the Rao ministry. Nor was it the first time she displayed such selective amnesia. Earlier the same year she had said she would resign her minister-ship when she was defeated by colleague Somen Mitra in elections for the post of President of West Bengal Pradesh Congress Committee. She conveniently forgot to follow up on this too.
Just 24 hours before the results of the just-concluded municipal polls, Banerjee accused the CPI(M) of wholesale rigging. When the results showed a massive mandate for the Trinamool, Banerjee forgot about her charge.
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It is not for nothing that Banerjee is known in the Bengali press as khyapate (an expressive term that signifies a mercurial temper and unpredictable behaviour). Her followers and detractors still remember the hot summer day in April, 1996, when Banerjee announced her intention to commit suicide in public in protest against the nominations of four Congress candidates for the Assembly election. Her contention was that the nominees concerned were “anti-socials with a criminal past” (one of them is now an MP and minister in the current United Progressive Alliance).
A complaint to the Congress High Command had been ignored. Her supporters appeared to be distraught and thronged her Kalighat home. Banerjee then put in an appearance with a black shawl over her head, declared her intention to commit suicide then allowed herself to be dissuaded and filed her nomination papers instead.
While her party colleagues might find her hard to fathom, Banerjee has proved time and time again, that she’s understood what the people of West Bengal — those who don’t support the CPI(M), that is — are saying. In 1984, she contested her first Lok Sabha election against a CPI(M) heavyweight, the lawyer and later Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee, from Jadavpur, defeating him so thoroughly that he could never contest from that constituency again.
In 1998, she made much of an “attempt” on her life soon after she founded the Trinamool Congress and was constantly and stridently claiming police atrocities against her person. By then, those who were not distracted by what the English press dismissed as publicity-seeking antics recognised that she had emerged as the leader with the biggest mass following in West Bengal. This was because she never lost her moorings, when in power or out of it. In a state that lionises poverty, she continued to live in simple house with a tin roof near a mosquito-infested open canal and cultivate her didi persona. Her style statement runs to handloom saris, rubber chappals and a modest Indian watch. Not for her flashy mobiles and fancy cars. Till recently she used her personal secretary’s car in Delhi, before acquiring a Maruti Zen.
Banerjee is against the CPI(M). So are many people in West Bengal. In the absence of an alternative, she has become the de facto base behind which the forces discontented with the CPI(M) — both rural and urban — have coalesced. But the problem is nobody knows what she stands for. Her political decisions are propelled by a single-point agenda of capturing Writers’ Buildings in 2011, rather than whether a policy is good for the state or not.
In the last few years, Banerjee has steadfastly refused to share a platform with Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee barring the failed tripartite meeting at Raj Bhavan in 2007 to resolve the Singur crisis that drove Tata Motors’ Nano project out of the state and to Narendra Modi’s Gujarat. To prove her credentials as the true “jihadi” against the Left in the state, Banerji does not feel the need to interact with the Left Front even in the matters of common peoples’ interest, which often puts the moderates in her party ill at ease.
Whimsical political stands abound. In 2008, when the Left Front government decided to move a chemical hub from the volatile Nandigram to an entirely uninhabited island in the Bay of Bengal, Nayachar, she didn’t say a word. Now, after the central government has cleared the project, she says she will not let it go ahead on grounds of “environmental pollution”.
As Banerjee’s stature grew from a mere Congress MP to powerful opposition leader in the state, her close associates got a taste of her quicksilver temper and grew a little weary of it. After the municipal poll victory she was heard saying that this time her Mayoral candidate for Kolkata Corporation would be chosen from among one of her workers. Asked what her remark meant, a senior party leader laughingly said in the Trinamool headed by Banerjee there was only one leader, Banerjee herself. All the rest were workers.
Such is Banerjee’s hold on her party, however, that leaders know they must indulge her every whim, or face a fall from grace. This leads to unforeseen consequences, as several leaders who thought they had a brilliant political future discovered after they were dumped by Banerjee — for not listening to Rabindra Sangeet with the right level of concentration (Banerjee was singing) or for not taking medicines she had prescribed (she fancies herself a doctor), for example.
Her dalliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) at the Centre, her supporters now claim, was a result of being shut out of the Congress during this period. But she was neither a pillar of strength for the NDA nor a minister who performed brilliantly: She became Railway Minister in 2000 and resigned in 2001 over allegations of corruption against defence minister George Fernandes made in Tehelka magazine. But she returned to the NDA in 2004 to a disastrous general election result: her party was reduced to one seat (her own) after having had nine in the previous Lok Sabha.
It was as Railway Minister that she started the project of painting West Bengal in Trinamool colours. The 2004 election debacle allowed her to concentrate on building her party in the state and making an ideology of opposition to the Left: a tactic that has paid off today.
Without her base in Bengal strengthening by the day, Banerjee has been able to skip Cabinet meetings, and has pretty much run governance in her own style: she who governs the least, governs the most. And but for the affection of Congress President Sonia Gandhi, she may have found herself under fire from government colleagues.
The question, though, is how the Centre will cope with her when she delivers her inevitable triumph at the Assembly elections next year.