A glaring chink in Mamata’s armour

Ajoy Bose
Journalist and Author

WEST Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s tame capitulation last week to striking junior doctors in her state to end their agitation underlines how weak and vulnerable the stormy petrel of Indian politics has become. Coming as it does after her imperious threat to the striking doctors that they would be sacked if they did not promptly join back work is a humiliating comedown for a leader who has so far never stepped back from a confrontation. It shows a new lack of self-confidence that is clearly linked to her party’s dismal performance in the recent Lok Sabha polls and the formidable challenge from an increasingly menacing BJP in her state.

A leader who has been close to Didi for the past many years confided that in her long and chequered career that has seen many ups and downs, she has never seemed so rattled under pressure as now. Significantly, unlike before when the Trinamool Congress firebrand invariably rose to the challenge and was at her fiercest when pushed to the wall, she now appears panicky and confused on how to fight her opponents. Her needless filibustering at first in dealing with the doctors’ strike and her abject surrender to them afterwards suggests that her fast-dwindling authority is affecting both her administrative skill and political will.

  Indeed, ever since vanquishing the mighty Marxist empire in 2011, Mamata has dominated West Bengal’s political landscape so totally that she seems unwilling or incapable of accepting that the wheels of political fortune are once again turning and this time it is she and her party that may get trampled under them. The Chief Minister is in double jeopardy. She is not only facing a serious challenge at the local level because various segments of the state’s population are gathering behind the BJP to oust her, but is also the target of the BJP-run Central government which is likely to use every institution it can manipulate to destroy her.

Already the Trinamool Congress is badly haemorrhaging from defections to the BJP right across its parliamentary, Assembly and municipal ranks. Mamata appears quite helpless in this almost daily diminishing of her party; given the way the political winds are blowing in India today, the anti-defection law is quite ineffective. Yet Didi can hardly afford to complain too loudly about the current plight of her party for had she herself not used the same tactics in the past to emasculate both the Marxists and the Congress.

The West Bengal Chief Minister is also under constant pressure to keep the law and order pot from boiling over with increasing fights between her party cadre and that of a resurgent BJP, which is now armed with a handsome poll showing in the state and the awesome second successive sweep at the Centre. With Amit Shah as Home Minister and a Governor who is unlikely to be too sympathetic to her, this is bound to cause enormous administrative headaches for the beleaguered state government.

So far, Mamata’s attempts to turn the tables on the BJP by appealing to provincial sub-nationalism among Bengalis against an overbearing Central government have not met with much success. Unlike in southern states like Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala where the outsider tag for the BJP does work to keep the latter at bay, this is not so in West Bengal as the phenomenal rise of the party in both vote percentage and number of seats won in the recent Lok Sabha polls has shown. An attempt by the Chief Minister to demand that those who live in the state learn Bengali, seeking to play on linguistic emotions among its people and portraying the BJP as a Hindi belt party, has failed to get her much support. 

The fact of the matter is that for a large majority of poor people in West Bengal, including Santhal tribal people, Dalits and backward castes, along with the substantial non-Bengali population, the Bengali language or culture is hardly an emotional issue and provincial sub-nationalism may not have the wings to fly in politics. As for the upper-caste Bengali bhadrolok middle classes who appreciate their traditional language and culture, Didi has always been too rough and tough a leader to enjoy much backing. Moreover, the Bengali bhadralok have been hostile for some time now to her overt pandering to the Muslim clergy and minority vote bank politics.

However, despite the deepening political shadows gathering around her, Mamata still has one advantage over her main and increasingly only political opponent in the state. The BJP is yet to find a local leader who has the credibility or stature to even remotely challenge the Chief Minister which could huge benefit her at a time when larger-than-life political personalities rule the roost in the country. What could help her even more is if the BJP government at the Centre makes the mistake of ousting her from office on the plea of law and order breakdown in the state and thus allows her to play the victim.