The chants of “Didi, Didi” were deafening as one tried to enter the most sought-after address in Kolkata on Thursday — a single-storey earthen tile-thatched house at south Kolkata’s dingy Harish Chatterjee street that has been and will be the official residence of the Chief Minister of West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee.
As the vote-count post the month-long assembly polls progressed and her party Trinamool Congress (TMC) emerged with the single-largest majority in the history of the state, the raucous cheers and trumpeting by party workers and supporters who had gathered near her residence since dawn grew louder.
Drenched in rain and smeared in green, her party men danced in the rains with posters of Mamata as women blew conch shells and ululated in joy. Her every word was revered, as she addressed a large gathering of the media, attacking her opponent Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM) for aligning with the Congress party. She also promised to continue with the social schemes initiated by her government in the last five years.
The journey from being a girl-next-door to being the first woman chief minister of the state five years ago, ousting the 34-year-old Leftist government, and now winning a majority in the 294-seat assembly single-handedly has been arduous for a woman without any patriarchal backing in politics.
Mamata’s foray into politics happened way back in the 1970s, when she joined the Congress party’s students’ wing during her college days and the party leadership was stuck by her dedication. “She (Mamata) used to put posters all night and next day CPM workers would tear them up. She would go back the following night and put them up all over again,” Somen Mitra, a veteran Congress leader who had joined TMC for a brief period, said during an informal conversation.
Mamata has always been a maverick and a marvel in Indian politics. As a student leader, she had once jumped on to the hood of a politician’s car and danced on it to keep the vehicle from advancing. As one of India’s youngest parliamentarians, and a junior minister, she occupied government offices to protest government rulings! And now as the chief minister of India’s fourth-most populous state, she attends office in creased, homespun sarees and flip flops, ferried in a second-hand car.
Her memoir talks of street protests, slogan-shouting, violence, police brutality and atrocities she had faced from the then ruling CPM. She suffered an almost fatal attack by a CPM party worker in 1990, which fractured her skull.
At 61, Mamata still seeks solace from her mother Gayatri Devi whom she lost in 2012. “You know I always believe that there is a larger spiritual force. I could not sleep for the last three nights. I somehow felt she was calling me. I felt her presence,” Mamata said during an informal chat on Thursday.
However, beneath the image of a girl-next-door, she has been a shrewd politician with a keen eye on occupying the anti-leftist space in the state. She broke the Congress party in the state in 1997 to form TMC and crafted an image of a champion of the masses — specially among farmers and the strong Muslim minority in the state, who have always played a critical role in a large number of constituencies in the state.
In 2006, the then Left Front government in West Bengal had allocated farmlands in Singur to the Tata Group, which was looking for land to set up a factory to manufacture the world’s cheapest car. To protest what she called forceful acquisition of land, Mamata went on a 26-day hunger-strike in the heart of Kolkata and eventually compelled Tata Motors to move the project out of the state. The following year, she sought justice for at least 14 peasants who were shot dead by the state police at a gathering to protest the creation of a Special Economic Zone on their lands in the West Midnapore district.
In her initial years in national politics, and even later on as Railways Minister in former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s Cabinet, Mamata faced criticism for her revolving-door politics and whimsical nature of being in and out of government. But she was able to connect with the masses with her policy of zero-tolerance to corruption.
However, it is the same corruption charge that she has had to battle this time when several of her ministers and party men were accused in various scams — including the Saradha scam, considered to be the largest financial scam in West Bengal since Independence. She also had to battle a lesser-known news portal called Narada that had beamed images of some ministers and parliamentarians of her party accepting wads of cash, promising favours in return.
Mamata, though, has rubbished all charges, calling it a malicious propaganda by a local news outlet and its owner — a media baron, whom she has had to battle for the last two years. “They are doing it for personal gains, but my government will only work for the people,” she said.
She has understood that in this age of personal gains and materialistic comfort, a larger ideology like that of Marxism is less sought-after as politics of freebies and demand for development of civic amenities gain prominence. Schemes like doles to every girlchild, distribution of rice at Rs2 (10 fils) a kilo and development of civic amenities have brought her back to power.
Archisman Dinda is a journalist based in Kolkata, India.
