Being Mamata

An interesting attempt to address the complexities and contradictions in Mamata Banerjees personality and politics.

Monobina GuptaS biography of West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, Didi: A Political Biography, is an interesting analysis of one of the most controversial, complex and important political leaders in present times.

The book lucidly takes one through the life and tempestuous political career of Mamata Banerjee, from a firebrand student leader of the Congress Chhatra Parishad at Jogamaya Devi College, to ultimately achieving her lifes ambition of assuming power in West Bengal by ending the 34-year-old Left Front rule. In the course of this journey, it also attempts to address the complexities and contradictions in Mamata Banerjees personality and politics. The author has explored the complexities within the broad framework of what she calls Bengals bhadralok culture, and the various influences, including cultural and religious, that have played a key role in shaping Mamata Banerjees life and politics.

Born on January 5, 1955, in a lower middle-class family in Kolkata, Mamata Banerjees childhood was far from easy, particularly after she lost her father, Promileswar Banerjee, at an early age. The book correctly points out that there was nothing in her life to facilitate her progress in politics. Her family and economic background, her lack of elitist accoutrements social and educational, made it all the more difficult for her in a male-dominated political scene. But Mamata Banerjee succeeded; what she lacked in sophistication, she more than made up in aggression.

The book draws heavily on Mamata Banerjees own autobiographical writings (but there is no evidence of personal interviews and interactions) and attempts to explore her personality in the combined light of what she says of herself and how she is seen on the public stage. The personality of the Trinamool leader is fragmented, somewhat dishevelled. The personal and the political are enmeshed, often even in collision with each other, writes the author. She perceptively observes that in Mamata Banerjees case the personal is the political, and often the former has threatened to swamp and destabilise the latter.

She has tried to trace Mamata Banerjees well-known paranoia, which is as famous as her emotional outbursts in public, to a lifelong sense of betrayal. Haunted by constant apprehension of persecution and conspiracy, Mamata sings a running refrain of pain and trauma, says the author, and observes that politics to Mamata Banerjee is cathartic and at the same time traumatic.

Mamata Banerjee entered politics in 1970, while an undergraduate in Jogamaya Devi College in Kolkata, where she soon established herself as a firebrand Chhatra Parishad (the students wing of the Congress) activist. Subsequently, she was made secretary of the Indian National Trade Union Congress (INTUC) by Subrata Mukherjee. Those days women leaders with oratorical skills were hard to find. Mamata was one of those rare finds, the book quotes him as saying.

A star is born

But it was in the 1984 Lok Sabha elections that she stormed into the limelight when she defeated the veteran Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader Somnath Chatterjee in the Left stronghold of Jadavpur. This was a turning point in Mamata Banerjees political career. The image of Didi, a peoples person gained flesh and blood roughly between 1985 and 1990, observes the author.

Mamata Banerjees second break in politics came with an incident in which she almost lost her life. On August 16, 1990, she was savagely attacked by CPI(M) activists when she was leading a procession on Hazra Road in Kolkata. The incident, according to the author, created around the Congress leader an aura of victimhood, suddenly scaling her image up several notches. The third, and most crucial, phase of her career was, of course, breaking away from the Congress and forming the Trinamool Congress in 1998.

Interestingly, the book points out that even though Mamata Banerjee created her own space in politics without the support of a male patron (though Rajiv Gandhi could be called a political benefactor, Mamata Banerjee herself said she looked upon him as a guardian) in a male-dominated political environment, she is not a feminist. While she is that rarity, a self-made female leader, Mamata denies any affinity to feminism.

The author also brings out interesting parallels and contrasts between Mamata Banerjee and two other women Chief Ministers Jayalalithaa and Mayawati. Indias two prominent women leaders [Mamata Banerjee and Mayawati] have in common a lack of social and cultural elitism, their eloquence in vernacular languages and their unease with English. And, crucially, their status as single women. But unlike Mayawati or Jayalalithaa, Mamata Banerjee made it entirely on her own.

Unique blend

One identity that Mamata Banerjee most loudly and proudly proclaims, and which is inseparably woven into her political agenda, is that of being a Bengali. Her politics itself is something quite novel in West Bengal, as is her political language.

This new form blends religious and spiritual aphorisms with the rhetoric of land struggles, human rights, justice, and development for the poor. So the language she deploys to communicate politics is not just peppered with Left imagery, but also carries a liberal dose of religious and spiritual content, says the book.

However, this unique blend only found its most successful expression towards the end of her long and stubborn tenure in the opposition. The book carries us through the ups and downs of Mamata Banerjees career, both when she was in the Congress and as the supreme leader of her own party. Soon after the establishment of the Trinamool, Mamata Banerjee allied herself with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) a move that raised disquieting questions about her secular credentials, particularly since she continued in the alliance even after the pogrom in Gujarat in 2002.

Monobina Gupta argues that Mamata Banerjees decision to continue in the NDA seemed to vindicate her single-minded goal of removing the CPI(M)-led Left Front from West Bengal. Not secularism or communalism, neoliberal or socialist, the only ideology Mamata stayed unwaveringly true to was an all-out combat against the CPI(M), she writes.

While Mamata Banerjees relations with the BJP alienated a large section of urban Muslim voters, her repeated threats to resign gave her a reputation of being unpredictable and petulant.

Then came a period of uncertainty for Mamata Banerjee. She left the NDA and joined forces with the Congress, only to return to the NDA fold after an electoral disaster. By 2004, her political career was at its nadir. She was the lone representative of the Trinamool in the Lok Sabha, and in 2006 her party was routed in the Assembly elections. Most political observers had written her off, and as the author puts it, she appeared to be a political washout a toothless contender against the Left.

The turnaround

The turnaround came in 2006, bringing in a new phase in West Bengals political history. The catalysts for the change were Singur, Nandigram and Lalgarh. These movements resurrected Mamata Banerjees moribund political career and essentially brought about her transition from a theatrical activist to a figure around whom leaders, intellectuals, activists and artistes rallied.

However, Monobina Guptas arguments while addressing the issue of Mamata Banerjees relationship with the Maoists are not very convincing. [I]n Nandigram, the Trinamool-Maoist nexus might have been just a flight of CPI(M) fancy, she writes.

The Maoists themselves have admitted to their involvement in the Nandigram violence, and it is surprising that such information escaped the biographers attention, herself a senior journalist.

As to the Trinamools involvement in the Lalgarh movement a glance at the list of those villagers murdered by the Maoists simply for being supporters of the CPI(M) will clearly indicate that it was a part of a strategy to create a political vacuum in the region once considered a CPI(M) stronghold. It is no secret which party gained most from the Maoist presence in Jangalmahal. Nor is it any secret that Mamata Banerjee kept up the pressure on the Centre to have the Central security forces removed from the region. However, after assuming power, she successfully used the same security forces to curb the movement in West Bengal.

So when the author says, The Lalgarh movement ought not to be remembered as a symbol of a Mamata-Maoist alliance, but for what it actually represented: yet another section of Bengali society, long forgotten by the government, rising in protest against the order of things it appears she is uttering the words Mamata Banerjee would love to hear.

While it is true that there was neglect of the tribal population in the region by the previous government, the murders, extortion and reign of terror perpetrated by the Maoists had little to do with ameliorating the grievances of the poor. The truth is that Mamata Banerjee turned a blind eye to those killings because of political expediency; for no sooner the Maoists turned their guns on the Trinamool workers in the region than she broke the unspoken truce and came down heavily upon them.

Moreover, the book seems to overlook certain harsh realities accompanying Didis rise to power. It hardly gives an indication of what could be expected from her those closely following her agitations had received enough indication to make intelligent assumptions. Her authoritarian attitude that would harbour absolutely no criticism, and her willingness to sacrifice not just the future of hapless farmers (of the 13,000 farmers affected by the Singur project, only 2,200 had refused to collect their compensation cheques) but arguably the chances of industrial resurgence in West Bengal on the altar of political expediency was made clear during the Singur agitation.

She has still not kept her promise to return the land to the farmers. Also, time and again she has displayed a streak of intolerance towards not only the media but also ordinary citizens for perceived criticism of her government. Be it sending a professor to jail for forwarding a joke through e-mail or calling college girls Maoists when they asked her, on a national news channel, questions she found uncomfortable to turning a blind eye to a rape victims plight, the Mamata Banerjee government has so far not lived up to the expectations of the people who voted for her.

But the book is important in that it does provide a perspective of an important national leader at the height of her power and gives interesting glimpses into what has made Mamata Banerjee what she is today.