If The Dooars Open

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“No, I’ve not come to see the helicopter. I’ve come here for Didi,” a schoolboy in a red T-shirt tells the policeman, who is part of the tight security ring at the playground behind Kalindi High School, in West Bengal’s Malda district. “You don’t even know who Didi is. Tell me, who is she?” the cop taunts him. “She is the Congress chief,” the schoolboy declares with confidence.

This minor act, part of the larger script of Mamata Banerjee’s first poll campaign tour in north Bengal, captures one part of a larger truth. It proves that if there’s one place where Mamata needs the Congress as her decade-long fight to dethrone the Left Front reaches a crescendo, it’s here in the northern districts, a known weak spot of the Trinamool. (On April 18, the north will cast the first votes in Bengal’s five-phase assembly polls.) But there’s a new confidence in the way Mamata is steering her surge towards Writers Building. So she’s not riding on the Congress as a mere auxiliary—Mamata wants her stamp on the siege of the north. It’s a tricky side-show to put on as the Trinamool-Congress alliance tries to breach what has essentially been a Left fortress till now.

The TMC-Congress combine has only 11 legislators in the outgoing assembly out of the 54 that the districts of Darjeeling, Jalpaiguri, Coochbehar, north and south Dinajpur and Malda send. Out of this, TMC has only one (Ashok Mondal from Coochbehar). Still, the TMC chief managed to strike a 50-50 seat-sharing arrangement with the Congress, fielding 27 (including one NCP candidate) and leaving the other half to the Congress. It was against this backdrop that Didi launched what’s being called her “blitzkrieg” in the north. The general consensus among citizens in the hills and plains of the north, from Moinaguri to Malda, is: Mamata is leaving little to chance, “carpet-bombing” the north—if election campaigning can be thus compared.

Conspicuous by their absence in the north are top Left leaders like CM—and the Left’s chief misterial candidate—Buddhadeb Bhattacharya. Even with TMC and Congress leaders (including Mamata and Sonia Gandhi) descending on the northern districts, Buddhadeb has neither visited nor has any plans to campaign in the area before the first phase. Several reasons have been cited for this, including the CM’s reluctance to face negative issues like land acquisition. His apprehension, it is said, stems from the possibility that the opposition will introduce these issues if he visits the north, which will mar the campaign.

However, top Left leaders claim north Bengal is not a problem area, and therefore doesn’t merit much attention. Left Front partner RSP’s Kshiti Goswami, also the Left candidate from Alipurduar, explained to Outlook, “We don’t have any problems with voters in the north. Our biggest mistake was forceful land acquisition, and that happened in the south. So in the north we are not facing the fury of the people. We are safe here.”

Mamata’s carefully orchestrated whirlwind tours are designed not just to storm a traditional Left bastion but also, subtly, to get the better of her principal ally, the Congress. In fact, her northern campaigning, just before the elections, showcased Mamata as a master strategist who used the Congress for her own gain, aiming to tot up a good score first up.

Consider, first of all, the timing. Instead of campaigning along with Sonia and Rahul Gandhi (they are to address rallies in the area on April 14 and 15), Mamata ensured she went to the electorate before the two heaviest pieces in the Congress artillery. All this so that the Sonia-Rahul campaigning appears to be a footnote to her more thorough legwork. On April 12, she paraded Left dissidents, now candidates of the Trinamool, in Jalpaiguri and Coochbehar, and said TMC was the natural refuge for such unhappy Leftists. Of course, most voters were duly impressed with her signature fiery speeches.

Furthermore, if spectacles are meant to inspire awe, few campaigning ruses could beat Mamata’s arrival at rallies in a helicopter. Crowds thronged the grounds (over a dozen meetings were held in less than six days), straining their eyes for hours for her aircraft to finally appear, a speck in the horizon. The youth, the old and children came out in droves, waiting for a glimpse of Mamata. “She must be very important if she is going to come here by a chopper,” says Alamun Bibi, a Malda housewife, who had set out by foot at dawn to be at the meeting at Kalindi town. Shabitri Mitra, the TMC candidate from Malda, nods in approval, “Yes, Didi is very big. But she is not that big so that she won’t look after even the smallest of people.”

Speaking to Outlook, Shabitri puts things in perspective. “Sure, the TMC did not get much of a chance to work in north Bengal. But we are going to correct the Left’s lapses. Wherever people have suffered because of the Left, TMC has stepped in to help. The same strategy will work in north Bengal.”

Once she gets off her chopper, Didi, ever the master performer, is quick to go around the ground, presenting herself to all supporters. The cheers are ear-splitting. She smiles and waves, and then, in a speech lasting under 30 minutes, she reminds the mostly Muslim gathering that the “injustice against the brothers and sisters in Nandigram and Singur” were injustices against them too. “Those who were killed there were your family members. Those who were raped were your sisters.” Through such rhetoric, Mamata is trying to import the kind of fire and thunder not seen recently in north Bengal—the kind that made news in the agitations around Nandigram-Singur. She is also trying to win Muslim sympathies here, reminding them of the very many Muslim victims of Left violence in Nandigram and Singur. Mamata claims to have a record of protecting minority interests. As for the Congress, the assembled citizenry gets a gentle reminder that Sonia Gandhi’s party is with the Trinamool. “Congress and we are together in this.” The subtext: if you trust the Congress, trust us.

After the speech, Mamata is whisked away back into the helicopter. As it takes off, there rises a massive cloud of dust. Under the relatively calm skies of north Bengal, what Mamata hopes to set off is a political Nor’wester, a dust storm to blind the entrenched Left.