Didi’s Day In The Supreme Court: Politics, Not Pleadings

It has never been easy to stop Mamata Banerjee from finishing her words, or from an action she has decided on. Multiple Lok Sabha Speakers have had first-hand experiences of this when she was a member of the parliament. The bench led by Chief Justice of India, Surya Kant, saw it up close on Wednesday when the West Bengal chief minister personally appeared in the top court to argue her case as a litigant against the Election Commission of India (ECI)’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral roll.

As the first sitting chief minister to argue in person during a Supreme Court hearing, Banerjee, clad in a black gown, stood quietly for some time, flanked by her lawyers Shyam Divan and party colleague-cum-advocate Kalyan Banerjee. However, when she started to speak, in her trademark agitated mood, she was almost unstoppable, speaking nonstop for a three-minute stretch on one instance.

At one point, the CJI tried to softly persuade her to let her counsel speak. “Madam Mamata, we have no doubt about the ability of Mr. Diwan. He is one of the best senior counsels you have chosen. Let him speak on your behalf,” said the CJI. But Banerjee barely let the CJI finish. “Yes, sir, with his permission, I want to highlight only one point, sir!”

While she holds an LLB degree, getting into the legal nitty-gritty was not her priority. For that, she had the counsels hired. Her in-person appearance was meant to deliver a political message to the people of Bengal, especially those who are irate by harassment due to the SIR exercise — she is taking their battle to the highest forums possible. She had led rallies on the streets and pleaded before the Chief Justice of India.

The legal merit of her arguments mattered less than the enthusiasm that she has managed to inject among her party and support base through her politics of optics.

The move certainly unsettled her opponents to some extent. Suvendu Adhikary of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Leader of the Opposition in the state Assembly, highlighted that the Supreme Court’s order following the days’ proceedings did not mention her as one arguing the case.

“The court records depict an opposite picture than what has been painted in her publicity stunt before the media,” Adhikary argued.

Bikashranjan Bhattacharyya, a former CPI(M) Rajya Sabha member and advocate, alleged that Banerjee went there only for theatrics. “She did not say anything new. All points were raised earlier. Had she not been holding a constitutional position, the court would have scolded her for wasting its time. She only insulted her own legal counsels by showing she does not trust them.”

TMC supporters, on the other hand, asked what stopped Bhattacharyya, who had earlier petitioned the top court on many issues against the state government, to approach the apex court against the SIR.

The CPI(M), which had initially demanded that the electoral list must be cleaned of false, dead and migrated voters, and called for stopping fear-mongering over the SIR. The party has recently started criticising the SIR process strongly, even though they keep blaming the state government for increasing people's harassments.

In the apex court, Banerjee alleged that the ECI, acting in political interest, had empowered micro-observers deputed from different BJP-ruled states with the authority to decide on voter deletion, and was discriminating against Bengal electors by making different rules for different states. She called the ECI “WhatsApp commission”, referring to its frequent instructions issued through WhatsApp messages. She alleged the ECI only intended to delete names, and did not respond to six letters she had shot. Her argument sounded quite similar to her Lok Sabha speeches.

That, however, was the point of her appearance in the first place. To use the court premises as a platform for her political message against what she calls the ECI-BJP alliance, a speech aimed at drawing the highest possible attention.

Banerjee had argued in different district courts six times between 1994 and 2003. Every time, she was backed by a battery of her party’s lawyers. On every occasion, her appearance in the court was primarily about a political message to her followers, she is there to lead the battle from the front.

The first time she appeared in a court was in Balurghat of Dakshin Dinajpur district in northern West Bengal on February 10, 1994. At that time, she was a Congress Lok Sabha MP.

During a visit to the district, she heard some of her party workers were in jail for several weeks. The next date of hearing was on the day after. She impromptu decided to join the legal team and lead it. That day, the workers got bail. The party was enthused. So was she.

The next year, on December 12, 1995, she appeared at Kolkata’s Bankshall court (metropolitan magistrate court) to argue for the bail of journalist Soumen Datta, whom the police had arrested on charge of stealing official documents. That time, too, she had a set of lawyers provided by Association for Protection of Democratic Rights (APDR), a human rights organisation, to argue Datta’s case.

Datta recalls that he was already in the ‘bad book’ of state police due to his role in exposing police foul play regarding the disappearance of a jute mill worker, Bhikhari Paswan, a high-profile case of human rights violation during 1993-94 in which Banerjee took a keen interest.

In 1995, the Special Branch of Kolkata Police suddenly picked him up in connection with a hospital-related case he was going to expose and produced him in court without letting him inform anyone. Datta was sent to a week’s police custody. On the date of his next production, Banerjee appeared with her black gown on.

“She voluntarily appeared on my behalf. I remember, the judge asked if she was a lawyer. She affirmed that she held a law degree,” Datta recalls. He got bail that day.

She herself arguing in the court for the release of a journalist carried a far greater political message.

In just three weeks, her party’s senior leader, Pankaj Banerjee, was arrested in Kolkata on charge of vandalising the Regent Park police station in south Kolkata. On January 5, 1996, she argued for Pankaj Banerjee’s bail at the Alipore sub-divisional judicial magistrate’s court.

The same year, on July 9, she appeared at the Bankshall court, this time to argue for the bail of some Youth Congress workers.

In 1997, she appeared for a party worker’s family in the Hooghly district court at Chinsurah on July 6. She had no previous plan. But when she heard of the plight of a family of a party worker who had been killed in political violence, Banerjee then and there decided to join the legal team. The court ordered in favour of the family.

Tapan Dasgupta, a senior TMC leader and former minister from Hooghly district, remembers that her presence had “truly energised” the legal team.

The last time she appeared in a court as a lawyer was in 2003. Some Trinamool Congress councillors had been arrested for heckling and assaulting Kolkata’s municipal commissioner, Debashis Som. Banerjee went to the court to argue for their bail.

Two decades after that, in 2023, she had expressed her wish to argue some cases herself. “Giving a brief (to a lawyer) and arguing your points yourself are two different things,” she said during the inauguration of Calcutta high court’s new building. She lamented that she did not have enough time to plead her own cases.

The battle over SIR right ahead of the assembly election— in which she has to tackle the incumbency generated by her rule of a decade and a half — has given her yet another opportunity to emerge as an opposition leader fighting for justice and against powerful forces like the ‘ECI-BJP combine’.

Her appearance in the Supreme Court was aimed at this simple purpose — showing solidarity with the ‘victims of the SIR’ while leading the battle against the BJP from the front.