Method In Mamata’s Madness

You clearly cannot win an argument with Mamata Banerjee. The West Bengal Chief Minister, much maligned and quite often misunderstood, in some ways resembles Oliver Goldsmith’s ‘Village Schoolmaster’, “who, though vanquished, could argue still”.

But there is much more to Mamata Banerjee’s opposition to the UPA government at the centre than meets the eyes. Part of it is personal. Unlike Atal Behari Vajpayee, Dr Manmohan Singh is yet to make the pilgrimage to Banerjee’s humble abode in Kolkata. Nor is the PM as accessible to her as Vajpayee apparently was.

What is more, she feels slighted at the slightest provocation. For example, it is said that the fact that the Prime Minister invited BJP leaders L.K. Advani and Sushma Swaraj to the lunch he hosted for the visiting Pakistani President, Asif Ali Zardari, but not the UPA allies, provoked her to point out that opposing the UPA was more beneficial than supporting it. Didn’t her predecessor, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, enjoy an excellent rapport with the NDA government and, more specifically, with Mr Advani ?

She jumped to this conclusion, without pausing to reflect that the BJP, as a national party and the principal opposition, has a greater role to play in cementing Manmohan Singh’s policies concerning the neighbouring country. A reasonable analysis would have given the PM the benefit of doubt and absolved him of any attempt to slight UPA’s regional ally. But the West Bengal Chief Minister is clearly impervious to such reason. Yet another instance of her impulsiveness is found in the ultimatum she held out to the union government for sorting out the debt-trap West Bengal finds itself in. If no solution was found within a fortnight, she threatened last week, it would blow up into a huge issue.

Ironically, she has claimed on record that her government has fulfilled 90 per cent of the poll promises, that her government has done in one year what it was expected to do in 10 years and that she would give her government 100 marks out of 100. While such claims do not fit with her shrill complaint that the centre is steadily stifling and starving the state, she has also undertaken a populist course by hiking Dearness Allowance for state government employees and raising the ‘Special Allowance’ for Block Development Officers by four times, not to speak of the money that different departments are allegedly spending in painting the city of Kolkata blue.

While Mamata may get away with such bluster, the fact remains that she needs support of the Congress as desperately in the state as the UPA needs her at the centre. Even a cursory look at electoral statistics would indicate that the historic victory of the Trinamool Congress in last year’s Assembly election, was as much due to the AITC-INC ( All India Trinamool Congress and the Indian National Congress) alliance, which harnessed the anti-Left votes, as the general disenchantment with the Left rule.

Figures for the past several elections, in fact, show that there never was much of a difference between votes polled by the Left Front and votes cast in favour of other parties. Pro-Left and anti-Left votes were by and large the same and it was a divided opposition that helped the Left Front win election after election. Once the AITC and the INC came together in 2011, the result was already a foregone conclusion.

Could Mamata Banerjee, who derisively describes Congress Party in her state as the ‘B’ team of the Left or a water melon (green outside but red inside), be actually pushing the national party back to sup with the Comrades ?

While there is little doubt that one of her key objectives is to weaken the Congress, discredit it and ensure that it does not find its feet, it remains to be seen if the strategy actually pays off. She obviously reckons that has nothing to fear from the BJP, which has drawn a blank in the state in all past elections, and does not really care if a BJP-led government is voted to power at the centre. But whether a NDA government at the centre will play footsie and bail her out is by no means certain. Her incessant quibbling, nit-picking and sarcasm may, on the other hand, force the Congress to align with the Left for its own survival—a prospect that ought to worry her.

But, it will be foolish to underestimate her. She is a political animal and is on a roll. She may have tripped and fallen at times and lost some of the goodwill she had built up among the middle class, bhadralok. But it will require a lot more to pull her down. The litmus test will be the panchayat election in the state, slated to be held next year. If rural Bengal stands by her, it would add to the myth of Mamata. More importantly, the Congress will run out of both time and steam.

That is why the Congress will have to act now, if it wants to retrieve the situation. Mamata Banerjee, almost certainly, is aware of the threat and that would explain the frenzied political skirmish one is likely to witness in the next few weeks.