By Ashis Biswas
As the Trinamool Congress (TMC) Government led by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee steps into the third year of its tenure in West Bengal, official celebrations have been muted, if not sombre.
There is a good reason for the pensive mood within the ruling party. Make no mistake, the TMC just completing its second year in power, is on the ropes. Opposition parties including the CPI(M), the Congress and the BJP are baying for its blood. The mood of the people after the Saradha chit fund scam is sullen, both in urban and rural areas. It is common knowledge that the TMC’s support base in the rural areas has become very insecure. In the urban areas, the erosion of support for the TMC was already apparent. For all her sang froid in public gatherings, party insiders admit that the Chief Minister is very morose these days. Her speeches too have become more unfocused and rambling. The strain is palpable as she and her faithfuls, some of whom have been told to lie low, carry on as if it’s still business as usual.
A simple factual test will help in assessing the present position of the TMC. In these columns, this writer had reported last year, after the party completed its first year as Bengal’s ruling party, three areas of improvement. First, relative to the left front period, official revenue collection had improved by about 25%. Second, the law and order situation was much better as normalcy had returned to the southern insurgency-hit Jangal Mahal districts and the troubled Darjeeling hills. And third, the labour situation was much better as Bengal lost only around 65,000 mandays or so, a total contrast from the past, when mass rallies and protests disrupted normal life.
True, even in May 2012, the debit side of the ledger outweighed the positives. There was a massive drop in industrial investments, as ongoing road building projects, metro rail and other projects slowed down as the Chief Minister fought a running war with the centre, eventually quitting the UPA Ministry. There were virtually no new jobs, as campus interviews were no longer conducted in most colleges or universities. There was no let up in political violence as TMC supporters, encouraged by a section of the police, attacked opposition parties, behaved as local money collecting mafias and finally began to fight each other.
Even more damagingly, with the chief Minister busy inaugurating fairs and melas, discouraging industrialists with her hands-off policy on land acquisition, a totally negative perception has grown during the brief TMC rule about West Bengal. The situation has deteriorated to the point where no outstation or even local firms bother to respond to official tenders regarding PPP urban development schemes in greater Kolkata or relating to operations in the Haldia Port !
If this was the position last year, this year is even worse. For there is nothing to be added to the list of positives! On the other hand, the state government has suffered a series of minor and major setbacks in most judicial disputes, ranging from the ill-conceived Singur legislation to return land to farmers, to PILs seeking to expose the police-TMC criminal nexus in some areas!
But what broke the camel’s back is undoubtedly the massive Saradha financial scam, which has resulted in the siphoning off of at least Rs 50,000 crore, mopped up from the poorest of the poor to the comfortable middle classes, in West Bengal. Some estimates suggest the loss could be over Rs 100,000 crore making it the mother of all such scams in Eastern India, if not the entire country. The loot has continued over several years and the ponzy schemes had been well launched when the Left Front was in power. It is a fact that even known left (read CPI-M) leaders had been involved with the schemers and given them facilities.
However, within the left there were opponents too who tried to take on the chit fund operators, none too successfully. But the support given to the fund operators by the TMC was near total, from the Chief Minister downwards. TMC MPs became brand ambassadors to at least two chit funds including Saradha. One MP became a CEO in the fund-owned companies, while other Ministers promised total support in public meetings. Ms Banerjee herself inaugurated newspapers owned by the funds and ordered government advertisements to be diverted exclusively to their papers and channels. She gave interviews only to representatives of such newly sponsored channels, to make her preference obvious and appealed to people to read only the fund-owned papers.
The ruling party’s obvious links with the Saradha was bad enough, but Ms Banerjee’s handling of the crisis which according to some estimates, has hit the pockets of an estimated 20 million people in the state, not to mention people in Assam, Tripura, Bihar and Jharkhand, has been more shocking. As of today the state government has not filed so much as a preliminary FIR against the offending company that was headquartered in Kolkata. It is opposing the entry of the CBI into the matter, while Tripura and Assam governments, in view of the magnitude of the major regional scam, has called in the organization for help. Investigating police in Kolkata refused to share information with Central Enforcement authorities, which had to complain to the Kolkata High court!
Naturally opposition parties have made much of the deliberate foot-dragging on part of the West Bengal government, pointing out that Ms Banerjee wants desperately to protect her party men from official questioning and investigations. The local police have yet to interrogate at least 20 out of the 22 people named by Saradha company chief Sudipta Sen in his statement to the CBI. Most are TMC men.
Even as the pressure of public opinion and tensions within the TMC continue to rise spelling trouble for the partry. Ms Banerjee has thrown in her lot with the very people named by Sen as blackmailers in his story to the CBI. In a closed door inner party meeting, she has been widely reported as commenting,” Is Kunal a thief ? Are Tumpai (TMC MP Srinjoy Bose), Madan Mitra thieves, am I and my relatives thieves? And you (opposition) people are all honest ?….” [IPA]