She’s forbidden libraries from stocking some newspapers and is expunging references to Karl Marx in textbooks. What’s eating Mamata Banerjee? Aditi Phadnis decodes her increasingly unpredictable behaviour
At a cabinet meeting, just after All India Trinamool Congress supremo (and make no mistake, supremo is what she is) Mamata Banerjee had thrown yet another tantrum, a minister exclaimed in exasperation: “What is wrong with her?” The question was a rhetorical one, but one of his West Bengal colleagues took his time to answer it. He took off his glasses, polished them, put them back on and said evenly: “If someone thinks she’s a better poet than Rabindranath Tagore, a better musician than Beethoven and a better painter than Leonardo da Vinci, then everything is a problem.”
Banerjee, 57, is viewed by the political community (cutting across party lines) as a problem child who should not be allowed among grownups unescorted. The Marwari businessmen of Kolkata are scared of her. But to the people of Bengal her life is an open book and she is always unfailingly one of them. In a state that lionises poverty, she continues to live in a simple house with a tin roof near a mosquito-infested open canal. Her style statement runs to simple handloom saris, rubber slippers and a modest Indian watch. Not for her flashy mobiles and fancy cars.
Banerjee grew up in straitened circumstances, having lost her father when she was just a small girl. Her “people” are her family. So much so that she has an unbroken rule: she never attends any family function. Her nephew, Abhishek, widely seen as her successor, recently got engaged to a girl in Delhi. Festivities went on for three days. Although Banerjee had no other pressing engagements, she just stayed away. Her strongest bond was with her mother, Gayatri Devi (who died last December). When she used to leave her Kalighat home for work, her mother would come to the door to see her off. Banerjee would crane her neck, look back and settle in the car only when she had lost sight of her mother. Contrary to common perception, she is not particularly close to her brothers. She is impulsive, has strong likes and dislikes, and trusts very few people.
Banerjee’s mentor in politics was Subroto Mukherjee, former mayor of Kolkata, who got her her first Lok Sabha nomination in 1984 as a Congress candidate. She contested against Communist Party of India (Marxist) heavyweight, lawyer and later Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee from Jadavpur, defeating him so thoroughly that he could never contest from that constituency again. Mukherjee privately rues the day he let Banerjee loose on Bengal. This was the man who had got the Kolkata Corporation to pass a resolution that Sourav Ganguly should get a Padma award, and also said that he should get the Bharat Ratna, the highest civilian honour. “Dancing on top of my head is Mamata Banerjee; under my command is the army of sweepers employed by the corporation. With all this, I am still running the corporation. Shouldn’t I get an award for this feat,” he once said in a TV interview.
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Stories about Banerjee’s political moves are the stuff of legend in Bengal. In the Bengali press, she is known 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 to protest against the nomination 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 became an MP and a minister in the United Progressive Alliance). Before this, a complaint to the Congress high command that she would not contest the polls if these four were nominated had been ignored. Her supporters were wound up into a state of distraught hysteria and thronged her Kalighat home. Banerjee then put in an appearance with a black shawl over her head, declared her intention to commit suicide. But she later allowed herself to be dissuaded and filed her nomination papers instead.
Because of myriad insecurities and anxieties, Banerjee tends to be suspicious, vindictive and intolerant to criticism. When she was railways minister, her arch enemies, MPs from CPI(M), would often send her requests to confirm their reservation when they had to travel to Kolkata or New Delhi. Her office had standing instructions not to honour such requests. Mohd Amin, a CPI(M) MP, sent her a request once for his ticket, confident that he would get a seat. He reached Howrah railway station to find his name did not figure on the list! Her latest act of banning most newspapers from public libraries in Kolkata (because the papers are critical of her) is one more example of how her mind works.
She has some foibles that tend to become tedious for her colleagues. Banerjee is paranoid about missing flights and almost always reaches the airport at least 90 minutes before her flight is to leave, even if there is pressing administrative work to be attended to. She is a fitness freak and will not alter her exercise regimen under any circumstance; once she kept Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee waiting in North Block for nearly 80 minutes as she was taking her evening constitutional at colleague Sudip Bandyopadhyay’s Talkatora Road residence.
If disgraced colleague and sacked Railways Minister Dinesh Trivedi’s biggest grouse is that Banerjee treats her colleagues like used shirts, her complaint is that her colleagues don’t listen to her. On the day the Railway Budget was tabled, Banerjee was on her way from Nandigram to Kolkata. She confidently told someone who was travelling with her that railway fares would not be increased. She reached Kolkata to find that they had. Her imprecations cannot be reproduced here but she immediately labelled Trivedi as a man who was doing the bidding of the Congress rather than with the interest of the Trinamool Congress in mind.
This is her politics — how to get the better of the Congress. In the last Bengal assembly elections, although the number of seats held by the Left parties came down drastically, CPI(M)’s vote share did not. In many ways, it is the other allies of the party that let the communist alliance down. So, for her to survive, it is the Congress’s base that she has to appropriate. This is why there is no love lost between her and the Gandhi family. During the Bengal assembly campaign, Rahul Gandhi said quite clearly that the Congress must come out of the shadows in the state.
But Banerjee is conscious that she is losing time: and she’s losing her temper. Although she gave the state budget (recently tabled by Finance Minister Amit Mitra) 100 out of 10, later she called reporters and said Amitda had forgotten some things, so she was adding them to the budget. A list of sops followed. Bengal will have Panchayat polls shortly. It was the Panchayat polls through which Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress first made itself known. So events have come a full circle. Recently, in the Congress bastion of Murshidabad, defectors from the Congress thronged to cross the floor and joined the Trinamool Congress. So either the Trinamool Congress will get wiped out or the Congress. This is classical Mamata Banerjee who believes there cannot be two swords in a scabbard.
