Banerjee has built on a foundation of populism

‘My chappals [sandals] are long lasting,” the quintessential Bengali chief minister Mamata Banerjee quipped to me while replying to a question on the need for better footwear while walking along by the banks of the River Thames in London last September.

Like Banerjee’s famous ‘Bata chappals’, she also seems equally long lasting; at the seat of power during a series of scams and a collapsing flyover is hardly an allegory for her party’s political fortunes in the ongoing assembly polls in West Bengal.

In the last five years as chief minister, major scams have surfaced in the state, directly implicating her party members including state ministers, parliamentarians and legislators. Incidents such as the Saradha scam — a major financial scandal — happened under her watch. She also presided over various scams within her departments, the latest being the video aired by a news portal showing 13 of her party members accepting cash from a fictitious company in return for favours.

Despite all of that, Banerjee has swept every major poll in the state. In the last five years, she swept the parliamentary elections in 2014, as her party secured 34 of the 42 seats in the state. In 2015, Trinamool Congress won 70 of the 92 civic bodies in the state, including Kolkata. Banerjee mauled the opposition in the rural polls, showing her grip among the populace in both rural and urban constituencies.

The scams certainly gave the opposition, namely the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM), the Congress and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) an opportunity to point fingers at her, but completely failed to rumple Banerjee’s natural belligerence. As she knows, for the masses of Bengal, she is the party, she is the government and others are just fillers.

People vote for her, not the individuals she chooses on a whim, be they from the retinue of film stars and singers or the individuals she plucks from civil society and nominates as candidates.

For a long time Banerjee’s politics have been a mixture of personal charisma and mass appeal built on a well-laid foundation of populism and shrew religious and caste arithmetic.

In the last five years, she has built on these through schemes such as giving rice to millions at Rs2 (Dh0.11) a kilogramme, distributing bicycles and footballs to thousands of schoolchildren and giving grants to clubs run by her party members.

Reaching out to voters

To her credit, she has learnt how to win elections. She knows every administrative block within the state, having her own source of informers to know which way the winds are blowing, without depending on sycophantic party members.

She knows, unlike urban voters, who take a holistic view based on the parameters by which she has performed less than promised, such as industrialisation and job creation, rural voters need to be swayed for their votes and her workers are instrumental in reaching out to these voters and capturing grounds.

Her call for poriborton (change) in 2011, has proved to be merely cosmetic in the last five years. Though one has to admit that civic infrastructure has improved greatly with Kolkata becoming a much greener and cleaner city than in the past. People believed that Banerjee would provide a thorough systemic change but her failure to do this has been quite glaring.

Civic improvements though have partially satiated the urban voters, but millions of unemployed people are still fleeing Bengal for job opportunities in other parts of the country, despite the state holding an annual industry conference, pleading investors to invest in the state.

But Banerjee knows that it’s the rural voters, coupled with cold electioneering arithmetic, that hold the key to her return to power. Banerjee, often described as the best political student the late Jyoti Basu ever had, is more leftist than the Left, and her dogmatic approach of knowing everything could have bought a smile to Lenin’s face — be it advising doctors on what medicine to prescribe or advising fire services how to rescue those stuck underneath the collapsed flyover.

Her litany of faux pas, including her speeches at various forums, which are often a concoction of Hindi, English and colloquial overtures, may provide ample fodder for social media jokes, but are often appreciated by the rural voters as having a chief minister who talks their language.

The last monsoon season she cut short her London visit and spent the night at the state secretariat trying to control the rains as floods swept Bengal. It did little to stop them, but her party men went on a campaign spree telling the voters that the chief minister was spending sleepless nights over their welfare.

It’s a lethal combination of crafty politics; with some folklore-style campaigning that makes Banerjee invincible in Bengal.

Banerjee understands the pulse of rural Bengal. She knows that her appeal has far greater impact and unless she takes a false step, the people will vote for her.

Archisman Dinda is a journalist based in Kolkata, India.