Mamata’s intolerance harms Bengal
By Amulya Ganguli
When Mamata Banerjee won the West Bengal assembly elections 10 months ago, the CPI(M) must have resigned itself to a long spell in the political wilderness. After all, the Trinamool Congress leader had come to power with several advantages. First on the list was her immense popularity, which became evident during the closing years of the Left Front’ s rule in various elections and by-elections. Second was the fact that she had a friendly government at the centre. But, now, it seems that the Left may not have to wait too long for a whiff of power. It isn’t the 41 per cent share of votes which boosts the confidence of the comrades – after all, Trinamool and the Congress together had a similar percentage of support in their years in the opposition. But, what will encourage the Left is the recklessness with which Mamata is frittering away her hard-earned political capital.
It is probably her hard uphill battle first against her own party, the Congress, which did not take her seriously, and then against the Left, whose days in power saw her experiencing even physical assaults, which has conditioned her to be unrelentingly tough and uncompromising against her opponents. As a result, she is apparently incapable of acting with restraint since her street-fighting instincts still guide her. The fallout, however, has been disastrous for her reputation, for what enabled her to rout the Left has made her virtually incapable of providing responsible governance. Her tenure, therefore, as chief minister has turned out to be a series of confrontations with whoever she has had to deal with.
Hence, her summary rejection of the Manmohan Singh’s reforms agenda and even a foreign policy initiative like the Teesta waters treaty with Bangladesh. But, if her stance against insurance and banking sector reforms, FDI in retail and the aviation sector, etc could be explained by the fact of her background as a member of the Congress during the period when it followed socialistic policies, what is inexplicable is her intolerance of any event which shows her government in a poor light. It is this strange pugnacity which perceives any unfavourable development as a conspiracy – whether it is the deaths of children in government hospitals, or incidents of rape in Kolkata, or a fire in a market – that has made her seem paranoid. However, her latest show of petulance has not only exposed her as someone without a sense of humour, but also as a person whose democratic credentials are suspect.
To ask the police to haul up a reputed professor and his friend for an innocent cartoon is probably without precedent in a free society.
That the cartoon was based on a memorable Satyajit Ray film has the potential of making the infamy of her action outlive her tenure. There was an episode in another Ray film, Aranyer Dinratri, in which the actors played a game involving the names of well-known people. When the actor, Robi Ghosh’s turn came, he named Atulya Ghosh – the bossy Congress leader of the 1960s – to guffaws of laughter in the cinema hall. Now, Mamata has ensured that she will be remembered with similar derisory amusement during future screenings of Sonar Kella whenever the crafty “magician” in the film makes the gentle parapsychologist “vanish” by pushing him over a cliff.
Even more than criticism, what hurts a politician is ridicule. If Mamata seriously believes that she will be able to silence any dissenting or mocking voice by setting the police and cadres on the perpetrators, then she must be living in a dream world of her own where everyone is bowing and scraping before her. It is not impossible that the relative ease with which she could arbitrarily exclude those newspapers critical of her from government libraries made her believe that a similar censorship of the internet was also possible. Since she is apparently surrounded by sycophants who do not tell her what she does not want to hear, she may not have anticipated that a ban on the handiwork of a netizen will induce a large number of others to jump into the fray to make fun of her. What is more, the jeering will not stop any time soon; instead, all her acts, past and present, including that of making a lady police officer “vanish” because of her diligent pursuit of a rape case which the chief minister thought was concocted, will come under scrutiny.
It is West Bengal’s misfortune that its hopes for poriborton or change have been so cruelly dashed. The rise of the Marxists and Maoists – they were one and the same till 1969 – meant that their focus was on wrecking the system from within rather than on governance. It wasn’t until Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee realized how the folly of militancy had led to the flight of capital that the Left changed course. But, by then, it was too late. Now, under a blundering Mamata, the state is likely to miss the bus of development yet again. (IPA Service)