In 2011, Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress ended 34 years of Left rule in West Bengal. In 2013, the party >captured a majority of the panchayats ; in 2014, it >became the fourth largest party in the Lok Sabha; in 2015, it >swept the civic polls .
For five years, she was Chief Minister and Leader of the Opposition, occupying virtually the entire political space; in the just concluded election campaign, she played incumbent and challenger with equal ease. And yet as voting ended on Thursday, the Trinamool was suddenly looking vulnerable.
It was not that Bengal’s Agni Kanya had lost her connect with the people: at a public meeting I attended recently at Paschim Medinipur’s Narayangarh, her colourfully colloquial Bengali and histrionics — that can still slice through the dry comradespeak of Left politicians — held her audience enthralled.
It was not even that the appeal of her simple lifestyle has diminished. The legend lives on, for as Chief Minister she has continued to live with her brothers and their families in an insalubrious lower-middle-class Kolkata neighbourhood, on the edge of Tolly’s Nullah. She may have tweaked her look a bit, occasionally abandoning her Dhaniakhali saris (coarser and cheaper than the Tangails and Dhakais favoured by the elite) for an upmarket version of the same, but it doesn’t hit the eye.
But that’s where the good news ends for Ms. Banerjee.
Discontent writ large As I travelled through West Bengal last month, from Kolkata to Paschim Medinipur, Hooghly, North 24 Parganas, Bardhaman and Birbhum, the deep sense of disappointment among all those who had signed up for poriborton (change) five years ago was only too apparent.
Today, in Kolkata, no intellectuals, and no Aparna Sen, Mahasweta Devi or Kabir Suman, gaze down at you from giant billboards defiantly declaring, “ Poriborton chai ” (We want change). “Save Democracy” is the battle cry of 2016; and misrule, violence, inequality and suppression of dissent and free speech under Trinamool Congress rule the subject of conversations. A group of academics, writers, legal luminaries, and civil rights activists have even banded themselves into Amra Akranto (We are under attack), fielding, symbolically, a few candidates, backed by the Left-Congress combine.
If Kolkata’s bhadralok — from its club-going boxwallahs to its jhola-carrying intellectuals — were the first to lose faith in Ms. Banerjee because of her total disregard for rules, procedures, institutions, and clampdown on civil rights, as the elections wound down, the discontent in the bureaucracy and police surfaced, particularly among the latter.
As Chief Minister she had made the police force totally impotent by making it an extension of her party: empowered by the Election Commission, a battered police force sought to “restore its honour”, a civil servant said, after the first round of polling.
In rural Bengal, the conversations painted an even bleaker picture than the ones I had heard five years ago. The levels of anger differed, but the examples cited were the same — of Trinamool-controlled panchayats siphoning off Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme wages, of farmers driven to suicide, of those engaged in pisciculture and paddy farming not getting a support price, of flood compensation payments going only to Trinamool supporters, of wages for rural labour going down, of government jobs (including those of schoolteachers) not being filled up, of the plethora of ration cards created for the food security programme causing so much confusion that the really needy have been excluded, of land being snatched back from sharecroppers who had benefited from land reforms under Left rule.
But, above all, people talked of intimidation and violence by Trinamool workers. So is life any different from that under the Left?
Might is right “The Left were thieves, the Trinamool are dacoits,” a resident of Padapukur village of Haroa constituency in North 24 Parganas told me. What about Ms. Banerjee? “She’s a good person, but she has surrounded herself with crooks,” said Mohammad Karim Islam of Deganga constituency’s Hadipur village.
The Trinamool, oddly, is not embarrassed about its use of violence. At Bardhaman’s party headquarters, I met State Minister Swapan Debnath, who is also the party’s district chief. A question on the internecine warfare within the Trinamool and its notorious “musket vahini” elicits: “This is a war, my workers are in the battlefield: our only option is victory. You may be a brilliant student, but if you don’t do well in the exams, what use are you?”
If Ms. Banerjee adopted the strong-arm tactics of the Left, absorbing its “ harmad sena ” (goon squads), she avoided building a party organisation, fearful of any challenge. The Trinamool’s one-woman edifice has been hollow from within from the start and is held together, in the colourful phrase of a senior civil servant, “by willpower and chewing gum”. She doesn’t trust anyone except a few journalists and her chosen heir, nephew and Lok Sabha MP Abhishek Banerjee. Her personal belief in power at any cost has meant that today she has no control over her cohort of rampaging Trinamool warriors.
Have there been any pluses to her governance at all? Yes, say civil servants who have worked with her: she can be decisive and cut through red tape, as she did when she recruited young tribals as home guards in the Jangalmahal area. When she first proposed the idea, she was told that she could not recruit merely in one district. Her response was: “I want it done. You find the rule.” The rule was found, it was done, and the jobs went a long way in bringing back peace to the area.
And yes, along with the tales of corruption, in rural Bengal people talk of the success of the Kanyashree scheme — educational stipends for girls, including a one-time payment of Rs.25,000 at the age of 18, provided the beneficiary continues to study — cycles for school children and a vast improvement in the roads.
But will that be enough to bring her back to power?
smita.g@thehindu.co.in
