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Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee's
inability to transform herself from a rabblerouser to a
responsible politician cannot but have come as a huge
disappointment to the people of West Bengal.
Having lived through three decades of the Communist Party of
India-Marxist's (CPI-M) cadre raj, they expected that the 'paribartan'
or change promised by the feisty Trinamool Congress leader would
bring to an end the practice of the government tailoring its words
and deeds to partisan requirements. If anyone was thought to be
the right person to do so, it was Mamata because of her common
touch, which has long been evident in the way she dresses and
lives.
In their eagerness, however, to bid goodbye to the past, the
average citizen may have overlooked some of the glaring
deficiencies in Mamata's political and administrative style.
For one, her politics had always been marked by the one-point
agenda of ousting the Left. To achieve this goal, she did not
hesitate to switch back and forth between the Bharatiya Janata
Party (BJP) and the Congress, suggesting that she was a
weather-cock who did not have a clear ideological vision. An
offshoot of this itinerant political style is she cannot be
depended upon - a fickleness which the Congress is ruing today.
For another, her stint as railway minister in both Atal Bihari
Vajpayee's and Manmohan Singh's cabinets - an apt example of her
brittle loyalties - showed that she had little interest in dull,
desk-bound, routine but essential work on files. There was a
period towards the last few months of her tenure when her visits
to the ministerial office in Delhi became few and far between as
she concentrated on fighting her political battles in West Bengal.
The warning conveyed by that period of absenteeism about what can
be expected of her as chief minister has now been fulfilled. But
it isn't the lack of attendance which is a worry this time, but
her hogging of all the limelight and turning all other ministers,
who include a former chief secretary and a secretary of a chamber
of commerce, into ciphers. This trait of grabbing everything
herself was evident when she was the only cabinet minister from
her party in Manmohan Singh's cabinet although with 19 MPs,
Trinamool Congress could have had three full-time ministers. But
Mamata evidently did not want to have anyone else of an equal rank
from her party in the cabinet.
What this denotes is a sense of insecurity, which is surprising in
a one-person party. Arguably, it is her ordinary upbringing,
limited education and lack of any ideological depth which explains
why she wants to keep all those with a more impressive bio-data at
arm's length. Besides, the 14-year-old Trinamool itself is an
artificial construct, comprising defectors from the Congress,
fading film stars, a pro-Maoist song writer and other
time-servers.
If the chief minister is insecure in her own party, she is
paranoid about what is happening outside. Hence her description of
cases of rape and of deaths of children in hospitals as evidences
of a conspiracy against her government. But if she barely escaped
being severely censured because of her indifference to the
hospital deaths, she has evoked widespread outrage at the way she
initially dismissed as "concocted" the case of a gangrape in a
moving car of a woman returning from a night club.
Taking a cue from the chief minister, police were equally callous
about the woman's plight. It was only when Mamata's outrageous
conduct hit the national headlines that she woke up and accused
police of mishandling the case. But the gaffe hasn't prevented her
from recounting the irrelevant detail of another rape victim being
the widow of a CPI-M supporter.
Apart from these incidents, the outbreak of campus violence, the
clashes between the Trinamool and Leftist workers and the threats
of extortion faced by businessmen and traders show there has been
no 'paribartan' at all. If there has been any change, it is that
the place of the Marxist myrmidons has been taken by their
Trinamool counterparts in accordance with the familiar habit of
goons switching sides from the loser to the winner.
Yet, at a time when the law and order situation remains volatile
and Mamata appears to be out of her depth in the chief minister's
position, she has taken the curious decision to paint Kolkata blue
as if a facelift is all that is needed to set things right. The
move is all the more strange considering that West Bengal faces a
debt burden of Rs.2.3 lakh crore and that the prospect of an
economic revival is minimal in view of Mamata's aversion to
private sector investment.
After the long years of leftist rule, virtually from 1967, and
Maoist depredations with their ruinous impact on the state's
economy and work culture, the need was for a leader with vision,
who was aided by talented non-Communist economists and
administrators. But West Bengal's misfortune is to be denied all
of this.
Amulya Ganguli is a political analyst. He can be
reached at amulyaganguli@gmail.com
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