|
| Paribartan and payback |
| Barun Roy / Feb 23, 2012, 00:24 IST |
|
At this year’s Republic Day parade in Kolkata, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee wasn’t on hand to receive Governor M K Narayanan at the podium when he drove up. She had yet to reach the venue, having suddenly decided to leave her car and walk, just so she could wave to and get waved at by her fans. Was this breach of protocol intentional, to snub the governor who had earlier expressed his unhappiness over issues like farmer suicides in West Bengal and child deaths in government hospitals? One can’t say, but it was typical Mamata behaviour.
Monobina Gupta’s book, which she calls a political biography, brings this behavioural stereotype into sharper focus. The portrait she paints is that of an unusually complex character who is at once emotional, impulsive, authoritarian, superstitious, rhetorical, clever and calculating, has little regard for stuff like protocol, rule books and procedures, and is possessed with an exaggerated sense of self-righteousness.
The writer, a journalist, has formed her book basically as a narrative and does a good job of it. Although one could complain of her rather excessive reliance on interviews with known Mamata fans to flesh out her story, making it somewhat one-sided; her analysis of the roots of Mamata’s complex character, and the persecution mania from which she seems to suffer, should mark Didi as a valuable addition to India’s contemporary political literature.
The book recalls, in graphic details, incidents that formed the basis of Mamata’s almost manic hatred of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI(M), such as the violent 1990 attack on her at Kolkata’s Hazra crossing and her humiliation in 1993 in front of Writers’ Buildings, when Jyoti Basu was chief minister. It analyses the genesis of her acidic relations with Congress leaders, both at the Centre and in the state, and the circumstances of her forming her own party, the Trinamool Congress, in January 1998. While these helped define Mamata’s political career path, her lower-middle class origins and struggles in early life could have been the factors, as the book suggests, behind her “eternal martyr” syndrome.
In that respect, Didi helps one make a better sense of why Mamata, one of the most charismatic political leaders in recent Indian history, behaves the way she does, always boxing with shadows, finding a conspirator behind every bush and treating all criticism as personal attacks. Readers also get a better grasp of the psychological factors that might have worked for her astounding 2011 electoral victory over the Leftists: her rustic “otherness” in a world of bhadralok politicians – the way she dresses and speaks, her sarcastic, down-to-earth language, always filled with theatrics and, inevitably, rising into hysteric vocal fireworks – that raised her mass appeal and gave politics, for the first time in West Bengal, a pop flavour that appeared to many like a breath of fresh air.
By the same token, however, Didi also serves to confirm our doubts and deepen our fears. It’s one thing to win an election for the party with a heady mix of aggression, vitriol, half-truths and holy indignation that common people understood, loved and relished, and even sections of “intellectuals” found intoxicating. It’s quite another to run a government. Now that the damsel in distress is firmly settled in Writers’ Buildings, what happens next?
Gupta discusses some of Mamata’s likely challenges, arising basically from her acknowledged character flaws, but draws no firm conclusions. That job is now ours to undertake as it becomes increasingly evident that Mamata’s sole agenda at this point in time is to get even with her “tormentors” and reduce the CPI(M) to a political cipher in West Bengal. Even some of those who had earlier chosen to willingly suspend their disbelief in favour of paribartan, or change, have begun to wonder what’s really happening to their cherished dream.
In her payback frame of mind, Mamata is committing the same mistakes and using the same tactics of which she accuses the Leftists. The party-government nexus, bad under Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s regime, is worse under Mamata’s. Buddhadeb was at least answerable to his party. Mamata, as the head of both the government and the Trinamool, is answerable only to herself. Partisanship is as rampant as before, and openly so. Corruption and extortion haven’t vanished, as many had expected they would. Law and order remains a matter of deep concern. Politics remains violent and vengeful. Police continue to be politically manipulated. Whenever voices of concern are raised, Mamata and her cronies keep alleging conspiracy.
At the end of her book, Gupta wonders what’s going to happen to the Left. At the moment, however, one should be seriously worried about West Bengal and its economic future. The new government has produced no economic road map yet, no major new investments have been made; but Mamata is least bothered, satisfied with her populist beliefs and contradictions.
Even if some day, as the writer speculates, the “real” Left emerges from the countless Left organisations that now exist on the ground, outside the formal party structure, will it able to withstand the onslaught of the alternative, non-bhadralok political culture that Mamata has unleashed? I doubt it.
DIDI
A Political Biography
Monobina Gupta
HarperCollins
Pages: 216; Rs 299
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 Read Business news in |  |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Advertisements |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Content Guide
