A Political Circus

Amitava Mukherjee

(Amitava Mukherjee is a senior journalist and commentator. The comments made are his personal. He can be reached at amitavamukherjee253@gmail.com)

Even the bitterest critics of late Pramod Dasgupta, a former politburo member of the CPI(M) and the general secretary of the party’s West Bengal unit, admits that the deceased leader’s greatest forte was that he never disowned what he had said publicly or privately on earlier occasions. Although Pramod Dasgupta never held any official position yet his contemporary political leaders like Bidhan Chandra Roy, Prafulla Chandra Sen and Ajoy Mukherjee all of whom held the highest official status of Chief Minister, exhibited the same quality. Jyoti Basu surely does not fall in the same category. He was basically a pragmatist rather than an idealist. But he had his own dignified way of covering up past indiscretions. Does Mamata Banerjee fall in the same category?

The people of the state were witness to a rare political drama when a former mayor of the Howrah city corporation directly challenged the authenticity of the West Bengal Chief Minister’s words. Under Mamata Banerjee’s dispensation West Bengal is witness to another cheap administrative show when the secretariat, along with the Chief Minister, the Chief Secretary, the Home Secretary, other departmental dignitaries and senior ministers, is moving out to different districts for administrative review. In one such review meeting in Howrah district Mamata Banarjee spewed venom on the the Howrah City Corporation for recruiting temporary staff without the Finance Department’s permission. It was then that RathinChakrabarty, the former city mayor during whose tenure the alleged recruitments had taken place, stood up and told Mamata to her face that all the said recruitments had been done under the Chief Minister’s verbal order and described the circumstance too. Mamata tried to wriggle out of the situation by saying that she could not recollect any such thing.

In a word this epitomizes the administrative chaos and the political caricature that West Bengal has been witnessing under the Trinamul Congress (TMC) rule. It is also an ultimate denouement of a long regressive social process that had started with the accession of Indira Gandhi as the Prime Minister of India because so far as its social structure is concerned the Trinamul Congress is nothing but an extension of the Congress that Indira Gandhi had created. The sobriety and responsible political behaviour of the original Congress was largely absent in the Congress (Indira) and the party was swarmed by brash khadi-clad young people for whom probity in public life was not that important. Ruefully the Trinamul Congress, as an offshoot of the Congress, inherited this.

Since the impressive performance by the BJP in the last parliamentary election the Trinamul is experiencing one after another crack. The latest to leave the TMC is Sovan Chatterjee, a Cabinet minister and former Mayor of the Kolkata Corporation, creating a lot of cheap drama in the process. Sovan’s relation with his wife is strained under the shadow of his ‘friendship’ with a lady named Baishakhi Banerjee. This Baishakhi, a married lady and a college teacher, has no political past but she suddenly became important in the corridors of power due to her proximity with Sovan and became a leading light of a TMC-affiliated college teachers’ association.

Up to this point this could have been passed off as her personal affair. But not anymore because Kolkata newspapers are full of innuendoes that Sovan had been neglecting his ministerial and mayoral responsibilities under a charming spell of his ‘friendship’ with Baishakhi. So much so that even Mamata had once curtly referred to it in a party meeting. Since Sovan’s father-in-law is also a TMC bigwig this washing of dirty linen in public has made the TMC ridiculous in the eyes of the common people.

But beneath the surface there is another story for Sovan’s disenchantment with the TMC and it gives out clearly that the TMC’s political behaviour is like that of a brat. Denying the legitimate claims of many of her long time lieutenants Mamata has made her nephew (son of her brother) Abhishek Banerjee the second man in the TMC hierarchy and there is no love lost between Abhishek and Sovan. Rumour is also in the air that Abhishek has strong reservations about Madan Mitratoo, Mamata’s another one-time close aide who is now embroiled in the Sarada chit fund case. Many district and subdivision-level functionaries of the TMC now address Abhishek as the ‘prince’ and this has caused a lot of heartburning in the party.

Mamata has hired Prashanta Kishore, the vote ‘guru’, in order to spruce up the besmirched image of her party and its disintegration. At this stage it is difficult to predict whether Prashanta Kishore will be able to do anything. But an impression has gained ground that West Bengal is witnessing a political circus where TMC bigwigs and municipal commissioners are either threatening to leave the party or even joining the BJP one day and again coming back to the TMC the day after. It is also a more or less accepted fact that the practice of cut money taken by TMC functionaries has acquired an unprecedented scale when Mamata Banerjee is occupying the Chief Minister’s chair although the practice was also prevalent during the Left Front rule, albeit in a much lesser way.

Mamata understands the danger lying ahead. Hence she is trying to distance herself from the stigma of cut money by asking her party functionaries to return such ill gotten wealth. But her image as an administrator is also besmirched. On umpteen times she spoke the wrong way when she should have kept quiet. Perhaps on Prasanta Kishore’s advice she has floated a portal titled Didike Bolo(Tell your elder sister) which is an attempt to reach the common people directly by trying to attend to their grievances. But here also attempts to politicize are noticeable as two columns want to know whether the respondent belongs to any political party and whether he wants to be an ambassador of the Didike Bolo, which is in effect, the TMC supremo’s own programme.

In the coming days Mamata will try to present herself to the electorate of West Bengal in such away that she is different from the rank and file of the TMC and is untouched by any stigma. Thus she will seek votes on her own name, a practice she has followed all along. This is more important for her this time as the last Lok Sabha results established that her own credibility graph has started to follow the law of diminishing return. But her record as an administrator and the political behaviours of many of her colleagues will go against the TMC. Can Mamata Banerjee as a chief minister be compared to any of her predecessors? The answer is perhaps an emphatic no.