DIDI’S DEADLY GAME

A reckless Mamata Banerjee reduces Islamist terror to a Centre-state dispute

One of West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s numerous idiosyncrasies is that she goes to sleep in the wee hours of the day. The CPM goons who assaulted her on the fateful 16 August of 1990, she says, couldn’t destroy her determination to fight them to the finish, but managed to alter her “body clock” forever just by trying to render her inactive as a leader. Lalu Alam, among the CPM activists who attacked Banerjee, fracturing her head so badly that she spent a month fighting for her life in a Kolkata hospital, later apologised publicly for the near-fatal lathi blow. It took him 21 years to do so, the time it took her, coming back from the brink, to reshape West Bengal’s destiny by throwing out the state’s 34-year-old Left Front government.

No doubt, Banerjee is a consummate politician without parallel. Everything about her has an air of drama and disbelief. She first caught national attention at the age of 29 as a giant slayer: she won the 1984 Lok Sabha election defeating CPM veteran Somnath Chatterjee. She grew rapidly under then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s mentorship, continually taking on state Congress leaders who she alleged were a B-team of the CPM. Never a careerist, she had no qualms about quitting high-profile ministerial positions at the Centre, first when she was in the Congress camp and later in the BJP-led coalition. She didn’t blink before breaking off with the Congress and launching her own party, the Trinamool Congress, to take the CPM head-on in 1997. The risks she took were huge, but luck finally favoured her. Banerjee is now the first woman Chief Minister of a state where the Left was considered undislodgeable. Her unlikely success has been thanks to her resolve. She hasn’t been the type to charm the Bengali Bhadralok, the Kolkata- centric elite that often squirms when she speaks in English. Her demeanour embarrasses them. She is always hot under the collar, prone to making simplistic remarks. But her peculiar ways have helped endear her to the rural Bengal populace, once the backbone of CPM’s support base.

But all the charisma hasn’t got in the way of her naivete. Whenever criticised, she would sulk, refusing to entertain opinions other than her own. To her, it’s all black and white—black being her opposition, be it the CPM or BJP. This attitude has taken her places, with powerful allies at the Centre often yielding to her tantrums just to keep her in a coalition.

Ever since coming to power in 2011, in a resounding victory over a Left alliance that once seemed unshakeable, Banerjee has been a dictatorial leader, allowing no dissent within her party. Even mild criticism has evoked extreme responses from her. As a party member tells me, “Didi thinks she is infallible, like God.”

Generous and warm in private chats, Banerjee is ruthless and moralistic in public. The manic behaviour of her years as a street fighter often surfaces even when it comes to governance. Almost all her rivals, including the late CPM patriarch Jyoti Basu, have described her as “mad”, and Banerjee herself has done nothing to downplay the perception. The label has stuck. While she seems fine with it, her sensing of conspiracies in issues as pressing as terror and corruption borders on the subversive. She has vehemently denied charges against her party in the multi-crore Saradha ponzi scam even while a suspended party lawmaker, Kunal Ghosh, accused her of being a beneficiary of the scheme and termed her a coward for taking to the streets to protest reported efforts by the Centre to frame her in the case. Her defiance appears to betray acute desperation at being under the Central scanner. For someone who battled the formidable CPM, she perhaps knows only too well that taking recourse to anarchism would yield results only when there is a groundswell of support in her favour. Evidently, she doesn’t have any this time round. She would do well to realise that when it comes to combating terror— West Bengal’s border districts have become a haven for Bangladesh-origin Islamists plotting to overthrow that country’s Sheikh Hasina regime—there is no option but to take cohesive action. The ruling BJP at the Centre may have political designs on the state, but to not cooperate wholeheartedly with efforts to comb the state for terror modules bent upon manufacturing bombs and offering arms training defies common sense.

Banerjee is under fire for patronising allies of Bangladesh’s Jamaat-e-Islami. If she believes that being soft on radical Islamists will help her pull in votes from West Bengal’s Muslims, who account for a quarter of the electorate, she is only making it easier for her rivals to capitalise on the frustrations of majority Hindus. She has already earned a bad name by trying to set off a Centre-versus-state debate over the issue of tackling terrorism. By continuing to be so supremely imprudent and inflexible, she is digging her own political grave. It is a shame.

CPMIslamist groupMamata BanerjeeWest Bengal