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Events & Issues
New Delhi, 16 April 2012
Mamata’s Poribartan
DELUSIVE “2ND INDEPENDENCE”
By Proloy Bagchi
“Mamta is a
dangerous, populist demagogue: economically illiterate but politically astute –
(a) deadly combo!" tweeted Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Chairman & MD of
Biocon, when West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata
Banerji fired her own party’s minister of railways last month to the surprise
and outrage of many and discomfiture of her ruling alliance, the UPA. Shaw’s is
a fair description. In fact, many would say to the dot, especially after Mamata
got a Jadavpur University professor arrested last week for
circulating a cartoon featuring her.
Mamata has
thrived right through her political life on populist demagoguery. A great
street fighter, many used to call her “rabble-rouser”. She could rustle up a
few lakhs to choke the Kolkata streets at the drop of a hat. Mercurial and
combative to the core, she has had a history of intemperate, even aggressive
conduct inside and outside the legislatures, including Parliament. Age does not
seem to have cooled her down.
Highly strung and self-opinionated, Mamata has
progressively degenerated into an unpredictable politician, an authoritarian
leader and a difficult ally. Her stunning success last May at the Assembly
elections, when she demolished the 34 years old Left Rule of Bengal was a great
achievement as well as an opportunity and a time that should have bred humility
in her.
I still remember Kolkata on the 13th May
2011, the day the counting of votes was to commence and results declared. The
air was pregnant with expectations. The city folk abandoned their normal
chores. Glued to their TVs people deserted the streets and buses and taxis were
scarce. There was a curfew-like ambience barring that Rabindra Sangeet – a passion with Mamata – was being played on the
public address systems since early morning.
Hope permeated the atmosphere – the hope of a change, poribartan, as Mamata called it. As the
evening wore on and the results of the elections started trickling in, the
excitement was palpable. Announcement of every seat captured by Mamata’s
Trinamool Congress was accompanied by roars as people exploded into hysteric
excitement. Numerous Bengali language TV channels went to town carrying the
latest about an overjoyed Mamata and brooding Left Front bosses. With all the
results out by 5 PM people seemed to have heaved a sigh of relief at the
loosening of the decades-old stranglehold of the communists and their goons.
They had overwhelmingly voted for “poribartan”
– a change that they had been waiting for years.
It is not yet a year since Mamata, followed by
hundreds and thousands of euphoric supporters, triumphantly walked down to the
historic Writers’ Building to take over the reins of a populous and backward State
and already disillusionment seems to have set in. Arrogance born out of
infliction of a stupefying electoral defeat on her arch enemy and exhilaration
of heady power has bred a perceptible brashness, even a certain amount of
recklessness. She and her party-men have come to believe that they can do no
wrong and, hence, everything is blamed on the Opposition – the CPM and, of
course, the Congress, her electoral alliance partner with which she has had for
long an uneasy relationship.
Suffering from paranoia, Mamata feels that everybody
is out to do her in. Whether it is a fire in one of the reputed Kolkata
hospitals or inordinately large number of infant deaths in hospitals or rapes
in Kolkata’s outback, for her every such incident is a “set-up” or a
“conspiracy” to malign her. And suspecting such a conspiracy she had the reputed
professor arrested for lampooning her.
Intolerant of dissent, she could not stomach the
temerity of Dinesh Trivedi of deviating from what Mamata thought was the brief
given to him. Populist, as she is, she could not have countenanced burdening
the “aam aadmi” by hiking railway
fares. Further, what got her goat was the gumption of Trivedi to thank the Prime
Minister, other ministers and leaders of various parties including the leader
of the Opposition before thanking his own party leader besides articulating the
fact that the Railways were languishing in the ICU – pointing finger at Mamata
who was his immediate predecessor. No wonder, she blew her top.
With an
amorphous ideology, Mamata was earlier a fighter generally for the peasants.
Now she is trying to take up the cause of all the down-trodden to the
discomfiture of the CPM. Even goons of the Left, finding themselves lost in the
new milieu, promptly aligned with her party. Believing she has captured the
Left support-base, she is out to encroach on the UPA’s territory. She has
embraced its “aam aadmi” and has
claimed him as her own. Not only did she sabotage the UPA’s plan to hike oil
prices and later to bring in FDI in organized retail, she even fired her own
Railway Minister for committing the ‘sin’ of harming “aam aadmi”, embarrassing the UPA.
But, for
her, it was business-as-usual as she had embarrassed the Prime Minister earlier
as well when she haughtily withdrew from his entourage to Dhaka
disagreeing with the water-sharing Teesta Accord – a pre-negotiated
international treaty. Embarrassing her alliance partners comes to her so
naturally. She had twice walked out of the NDA government and, now, with her 19
MPs, she keeps the UPA government on tenterhooks.
What
matters to her are her votes in West Bengal,
the country’s international image or its economic progress hardly figure
in her political calculations. Indulging in meaningless trivialities, she
thinks she can lead the State towards progress by banishing Marx and Lenin from
its schools or painting the capital blue.
She hardly
is an achiever. Her neglect of two years of the Railways made the organization
comatose, not that it was very much up-and-about when she took over its reins.
It had already slipped into somnolence having become a victim of “coalition
compulsions” more than a decade back, headed as it has been by self-centred
regional parties.
Hostage to politics of votes, the Indian Railways is
seemingly devoid of any future. All the talk about high-speed trains,
air-conditioned lounges, introduction of anti-collision devices, etc., is
hogwash. Some tinkering will be indulged in with the rolling stock or the
tracks here and there but it will take eons for it to roll out a swanky high
speed train that China
rolls out in dozens every year. Passengers will continue to crowd into
virtually primitive, pests-infested coaches and journey in trains that clatter
along swaying from side to side on rickety obsolete tracks. Ride in trains like
those of Trains `a Grande Vitesse (TGV) of France, Shinkasen (Bullet Trains) of
Japan or the Chinese High Speed Railways will, therefore, remain a dream for
generations of Indians
With
nothing tangible to show for her year-long rein in West
Bengal it remains to be seen whether, with Mamata’s limited
vision, the electoral victory that she branded as “the second independence” is
going to deliver the Bengalis from their misery and backwardness. --- INFA
(Copyright,
India News and Feature Alliance)
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