Mamata Banerjee, the mercurial chief minister of West Bengal, seems to have warmed up to Bangladesh at last. Her change of heart comes at a time when, back home, she is beset with worries. Two of her party’s top leaders, members of parliament Kunal Ghosh and Srinjoy Bose, were arrested last year in a scam now infamous as the Saradha scam.
The state’s transport minister, Madan Mitra, also from her Trinamool Congress party, joined them in jail later. Her erstwhile closest aide, Mukul Roy, was also questioned by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). He promised to cooperate with the CBI and has subsequently been sidelined. A businessman who accompanied her to Dhaka was arrested as soon as he landed in Kolkata in a case initiated by Delhi police.
Bose, who was granted bail on February 5 after more than two months in jail, has quit the party after getting out. Ghosh, who is still locked-up, attempted suicide in jail. Mitra’s bail plea has been rejected. Roy is reputed to be considering a career in the BJP, though they have not shown much interest in welcoming him yet.
It is safe to say that all is not well in Mamata’s Trinamool.
For 34 years, from 1977 to 2011, the politics of West Bengal was dominated by the left parties. During that time, Kolkata, which had once prided itself on being the cultural and intellectual capital of undivided India, saw the action shift to Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore. It had ceased to be the capital of India in 1911. Gradually, it stopped being anything more than an overpopulated provincial town with fading memories of grandeur. The state of Bengal became one of those places that, if you didn’t leave, you were left behind.
When the Left Front had first come to power in 1977, the country was witnessing the start of the end of Congress dominance. The Emergency had just ended; a wave of anger against the Congress was sweeping the land. Parties across the spectrum, from communists to the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, predecessor of the BJP, benefited.
The communists carried out major land reforms that gave land to the tillers. They empowered the working classes in factories. A sense of social justice animated them and West Bengal.
Somewhere along the way, balance was lost. The positive aspect of social justice got overtaken by a negative understanding of the idea. The notion of violent class conflict, popularised by the Naxals, gained ascendancy even if it did not always lead to actual physical violence. It was not simply about helping the poor get a hand up; it was more about pulling the rich down.
Rich and poor are relative terms. Out in the district towns of Bengal in the 1980s, anyone with a bathroom in the house and a scooter would have been considered rich. Those were still the days of the shared hand-pump and the bicycle.
Mamata didi made a name for herself as a firebrand politician in that Bengal, winning her first parliamentary election in 1984 on a Congress ticket. Her lifestyle was austere, her politics confrontational. It was these attributes that helped her to finally wrest power in the state assembly elections of 2011. Her victory had come after years of agitations against the Left Front government over making land available to companies to set up factories. In those agitations that started in 2005, she and her Trinamool Congress were on the same side as the Naxalites, who, for a while, had a fairly free run through parts of India.
In a way, Mamata overcame the left by being more left than them. After Jyoti Basu, the veteran communist chief minister of West Bengal, the left was in the mood for perestroika and some glasnost. There was recognition that the state had stalled while the rest of India was powering ahead. But change was never going to be easy in a place that had promoted a corrupt culture of entitlement and impunity down to the grassroots.
As Trinamool’s power grew, many of the local worthies of the left parties, who were able to throw their weight around because of their party affiliation, began to switch over to her side. It was a feedback loop – the power drew the workers, and the workers contributed to the power. In Bengal, this often meant the power to physically block traffic, shut down shops, threaten violence, or inflict violence without legal consequences.
And so the muscle shifted, and the power shifted, but the political culture remained the same. There are signs now of another shift in power. Assembly elections are due in 2016, and the BJP is making inroads. Its vote share has grown sharply in the Lok Sabha elections of 2014 and since. It is now a challenger to the communists, and to Mamata. The Congress, shrinking everywhere, is the other player in the game.
There are reports of communist party workers switching allegiance to the BJP. Many expect some Trinamool-Congress notables to switch over to the BJP as well. The left, meanwhile, is trying to make an alliance with the Congress. Didi may also be amenable to a deal with her former Congress colleagues.
The deal-making and party-hopping might prove crucial in a close election with three-and-a-half reasonably strong contenders. In such situations, a few additional percentages in the vote share can make the difference between being second in many constituencies (and winning few seats) and being first.
The battle will be a fascinating one. However, no matter who wins, it is apparent that the political culture of Bengal will continue to lose. The state that once produced leaders of the calibre of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose is now bereft of leadership better than Mamata Banerjee’s.
It is lost deep in what Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore would recognise as the dreary desert sands of dead habit.
