Once hailed as Bengal’s messiah, the chief minister has set it off on a path to destruction
The last couple of years of Left Front rule in Bengal was unique. The power centre was, unofficially, almost divided into two — an elected government at Writers’ Building and a people’s one at Harish Chatterjee Street, the location of Mamata Banerjee’s ancestral home.
The loosening of the iron fist with which the Left had ruled Bengal for 32 years (at that time) coincided with Mamata riding high on a “wind of change”. She was being seen as the chief minister in-waiting, the unifying force who would deliver the once-great state to the promised land. The intellectuals, anti-Left voters and the media all lapped up her Badla Noy, Bodol Chai (no vengeance, only change) rhetoric; after all, she was the self-proclaimed “symbol of honesty”.
Bengal had seen an unprecedented “brain drain” during the Left Front rule — education and healthcare were in a mess, industrialisation hit a record low, dissent muffled — Mamata promised corrective measures. Gripped by the passion in her speeches and drawing from her long history of struggle against the Communists, Bengal slowly began to take her seriously. She also found support among the state’s intellectuals.
But then she made deals with the devils — the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha and the Maoist insurgents. Bimal Gurung and his Morcha had set the Darjeeling hills on fire, demanding a separate state for the Gorkhas — Gorkhaland. The hill town was burning, administration was non-existant and tourism suffered. Mamata promised to return peace to the hills.
Although there was no formal alliance with the Morcha, Gurung backed the Trinamul-Congress alliance in the 2011 Assembly polls. She repaid him in kind after the elections, creating the Gorkha Territorial Administration and signing a treaty that included, among other things, a loophole for further unrest on the demand for Gorkhaland.
Then there was the backing from the Maoists in the state’s disturbed western belt, collectively called Junglemahal, where the rebels killed over a hundred CPI(M) and Left workers between 2007 and 2011. Mamata and her party’s leaders shared the dais with Chhatradhar Mahato, a local resident, who liaised between the Maoists under its leader Kishenji and the Trinamul.
Former Trinamul MP Kabir Suman confirmed that the Maoists had supported Trinamul during the Nandigram violence, corroborating the Left Front government’s allegation that Mamata used them to fan violence in the area.
But Mamata’s overwhelming charisma drowned those allegations. She played the Muslim card and began to court imams for their support. Being a border state and with a 28 per cent Muslim population, Bengal was always sitting on a tinderbox of communal violence. One of the greatest legacies of the Left Front government was restricting the outbreak of communal violence in the state. But it never tried to emancipate the traditionally backward Muslim community, even after publication of the Sachar Commitee report, and Mamata used this to her advantage.
Her slogan of “Maa, Mati, Manush” reverberated with the people and she won the 2011 polls in a landslide.
The story from then is one of decline, her carefully hatched strategies coming undone at every step of the way.
First, she got into a confrontation with the Maoists, culminating in the assassination of Kishenji. Although a decisive victory against the Maoists won her plaudits, allegations of human rights violations were also levelled at her.
The relationship with Bimal Gurung and the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha also did not take long to sour.
Mamata’s hankering for more power and an Opposition-less state led to drove her into registering cases against the Left, Congress, the Morcha, et al. The plan was to scare them into joining the Trinamul. If that didn’t work, money was thrown at them.
The chit fund scam and the arrests of proprieters of many Ponzi forms exposed how the ruling party used fear tactics into exploiting them for money. This money was then used for horse trading of MLAs and Opposition leaders.
Election after election saw the government use brute force and even the police to strengthen the ruling dispensation — be it the panchayat, municipal, Lok Sabha or Assembly polls. Such atrocities were not even seen at the height of “red tyranny”. Former Trinamul leaders had accused her of being a dictator, Mamata was living up to that allegation.
The first instance of this dictatorial trait coming to the fore was when she decided to ban all newspapers apart from those friendly to her government and party from public libraries. She even ordered the Opposition to sit silently for 10 years as she went about pandering to the lumpen elements in her party. The recent spurt in violence in Darjeeling was a direct fallout of this dictatorial trait. All of a sudden, Mamata imposed Bengali as a mandatory language in schools across the state, sparking resentment among the linguistic and ethnic minorities.
With industries unwilling to set up shop, and the existing ones shutting down, she offered tacit support to the syndicate raj that began to run amok in Kolkata and other parts of the state. Most of these syndicates are controlled by the Trinamul and consist of anti-social elements that come in handy to scare voters during elections.
As chief minister, Mamata has constantly blamed the previous government of saddling the state with a huge debt. Yet, she always found money to pay to local clubs, most of which are the breeding grounds for anti-social elements associated with the Trinamul. This diversion of public funds to local goons came at the cost of infrastructure development.
In order to keep the support of the Muslim community, she announced an imam bhata (stipends for imams), sparking widespread condemnation among leaders of other religious communities for such polarising tactics. There have been allegations of Mamata overlooking crimes committed by members of the community, inevitably giving rise to a sense of invincibility among their members. The ongoing communal riots in Basirhat, a town close to the Bangladesh border with a huge Muslim population, also has its roots in Mamata’s attempt to appease and the BJP’s plan to polarise. There have also been allegations that the local MLA tried to shield Muslims who had taken part in the vandalism of government property.
Instead of trying to increase literacy rates in Muslim dominated villages in the state’s backward areas, introducing them to secular studies or creating employment opportunities for them, she adopted a policy of appeasement, as many have claimed.
But the Hindus in Bengal are also not as secular as they are known to be. The Left Front had suppressed all kinds of communal polarisation during its 34-year tenure, but allegations of Mamata appeasing the Muslims have given rise to a new Hindutva brand of politics in Bengal. The chief minister’s desire to purge the threat to her government from the Congress and the Left led her to leave an open playing field for the BJP to flourish in the state, and that has sparked tensions even further.
The BJP’s agenda is simple — appeal to the upper-caste Hindu majority through fear mongering. The BJP began to hark back to times when the Bengali Hindus ruled as overlords. Its Ram Navami celebrations, armed with swords, was clearly aimed at fanning the communal divide, which Mamata began in the state, and use it to its advantage. This sets a dangerous precedent, the Calcutta Killings of 1946 still haunts many survivors from those times and the last thing that the state, already struggling with lack of jobs and infrastructure, needs is another communal violence.
If that happens, that will be the end of Bengal as we know it and Mamata and the BJP will both have to share the blame. It will be the unfortunate end of a cycle of events begun by Mamata, but brought to its natural conclusion by the BJP.
The views expressed in this blog are mine unless otherwise mentioned.
Vantage Point 