Didi’s Trip to the UK

IT IS MY MISFORTUNE that until West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee undertook her bewildering trip to the UK, I had associated Kellogg’s with a brand of cornflakes that used to command a formidable supermarket presence in the old mother country. It is only courtesy Mamata Didi that I realised that Kellogg’s had now left its stamp on an Oxford College, an institution that used to be called the Department of Continuing Education, or something similar, back in the old days.

The relative newness of Kellogg College and its status as a haven for part-time students should not be a ground for turning up one’s nose. Ideally, it would have been befitting for an established chief minister and redoubtable political figure such as Mamata to address a gathering at Chatham House in London or even the Oxford Union. Let us bear in mind that in terms of size and population, West Bengal is larger than many member-states of the European Union, if not the UK itself. To have her address a gathering of no real consequence in a seminar room (some Bengali YouTubers claimed it was the college canteen) in a peripheral institution of Oxford did not do the image of India any good.

For this absence of appropriate positioning, I do not blame the chief minister. It is one thing for Didi to suddenly get it into her head that it would enhance the credentials of Biswa Bangla to make a trip to Old Blighty. Courtesy the fact that Bengal was the first province to be colonised, London holds an unreal attraction for most educated Bengalis of a particular vintage. Nirad C Chaudhuri, who fancied himself as the quintessential Bengali anglophile, used to boast that he knew the names of London streets even before he set foot in that country. I guess for the chief minister too, travelling to London and addressing the students and dons of Oxford University held a special charm.

Why blame her? For the long spell he was chief minister, Jyoti Basu took an annual break in London in the summer. For a few years, he maintained the pretence of trying to attract foreign investment but given the complete lack of any interest among Britons with disposable capital, he settled down to a week or so of relaxation at either the dharamsala—former Foreign Secretary Jyotindra Nath Dixit’s name for the Tata-owned St James’ Court—or at the home of a doctor friend. Oh yes, there was a year when he even turned up to the Friday afternoon seminar at St Antony’s College. Most of the audience were Oxford students and dons—after all, there was a mystique around the old communist—but he too ended up being heckled (not as boisterously as Mamata was) by a group of Maoists from the London School of Economics. One of the hecklers is a stalwart of the Khan Market coterie, but I wouldn’t like to embarrass him for his youthful indiscretion.

There were two problems with Mamata’s trip to the UK that became embroiled in controversy.

First, in deciding what was going to be the central feature of her visit, she was plain misled. I don’t expect the chief minister to know what was appropriate for a person of her standing and what was not. Her office should have done the due diligence. It failed her by putting Kellogg College at the centre of her visit and then being completely unmindful of all security arrangements. The result was that there were unseemly scenes that led to her being mocked in Kolkata.

Secondly, Mamata made the cardinal mistake of taking her entire durbar with her to witness her conquest of Britain. This also included businessmen who were squirming with embarrassment at being made to play the role of court entertainers. There is a very good reason why Prime Minister Narendra Modi doesn’t take a media entourage and business delegation to follow him around overseas. Their presence ends up trivialising the visit. There are certain programmes in any focused visit that happen outside the glare of publicity. In the case of Mamata, the frivolities— walking in Hyde Park, singing at the High Commission event in London, etc—overwhelmed anything that was remotely serious.

I recall a visit to London by then Chief Minister of Bihar Lalu Prasad, sometime in the mid- 1990s, ostensibly to secure foreign investment. At the end of the visit, his officials announced the high point of his quest for business: a proposal for exporting bottled Gangajal from Bihar to Europe. Did it suffer the same fate as Didi’s announcement during a visit to Spain a few years ago that Zara was going to open a factory in Bengal?

Biswa Banglaforeign investmentJyoti BasuKellogg CollegeMamata BanerjeeNirad C ChaudhuriUK visit