One year on, an outraged Bhadralok divests from Didi
Smita Gupta
The Hindu
In the summer of 2001, it was evident as I travelled through West Bengal
that fatigue had set in with the Left Front government. Earlier, in
end-2000, anticipating the public mood, Communist Party of India
(Marxist) veteran Jyoti Basu had stepped down as Chief Minister, paving
the way for Buddhadeb Bhattacharya. This ensured the Left victories in
2001 and 2006.
The Left extended its life by a decade not merely because Mr.
Bhattacharya gave it a new look but also because the only option before
the people was Mamata Banerjee. Ms Banerjee leading her three-year-old
Trinamool Congress, didn't seem capable of serious governance. I recall
many conversations in Kolkata: yes, Bengal needs a change, but Didi
simply can't be trusted to govern the State. If her trajectory as an
opposition leader is clearly the stuff legends are made of, her forays
into government — as Minister of State for Youth and Sports in the P.V.
Narasimha Rao government (1991-93) and as Union Minister for Railways in
the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government (1999-2001) — had been less than
inspiring.
That scepticism turned into burning impatience with the Left government a
year after it returned to power in 2006. If the anti-land acquisition
agitations in Nandigram and Singur saw a rural uprising against the Left
Front, the latter's inability to contain the situation and the human
rights violations ensured that Kolkata's vocal middle class, from
club-going boxwallas to jhola-carrying intellectuals, all signed up for poriborton.
Censorship, arrest
But today, a month short of celebrating a year in power, Ms Banerjee's
honeymoon with the opinion-making middle class is over, the shroud of
censorship she has flung across the State proving to be the last straw.
The watershed moment was the arrest of a Jadavpur University chemistry
professor Ambikesh Mahapatra on charges of violating the modesty of a
woman, spreading social ill will and disrupting social harmony, merely
for sharing a cartoon online. Later, it transpired that Dr. Mahapatra,
as assistant secretary of the New Garia Development Cooperative Housing
Society — where he lives — had blocked the Trinamool-backed syndicate's
contracts to supply building materials, earning the wrath of the party's
goon squads.
This episode has galvanised the middle class, especially the
intellectuals who had jumped the Left Front ship for the Trinamool.
Result: a Twitter campaign, “Arrest me if you dare, Mamata Bannerjee,”
and an online petition on Facebook mobilising support against the
government's actions. R.K. Laxman's “The Common Man,” mouth sealed with
two strips of bandage, and a graphic of a male face, hands covering the
eyes and mouth, adorn these accounts. Unfazed, the State CID has asked
Facebook to delete morphed images of Ms Banerjee, after a Trinamool
supporter complained that “objectionable comments” were flooding social
networking sites. Since then, a group of intellectuals has written to
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh condemning the Mahapatra episode that came
on the heels of another arrest — that of molecular biologist Partha
Sarathi Ray who had in April joined a protest against the eviction of
slum dwellers in east Kolkata. The signatories include Noam Chomsky,
Mriganka Sur and Abha Sur of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
top scientists from the IITs and institutions in Denmark, Singapore and
Sweden, as well as activists like Aruna Roy and Nikhil Dey.
Unperturbed
But Ms Banerjee remains unperturbed: for her, in an odd reversal of the
State's politics, these are her “class enemies” — the elitist English
speaking middle class, whom she referred to in an interview she gave
last month to NDTV; those who, she said, have contempt for her humble
origins.
As Chief Minister, she has made it clear she will not tolerate a
differing view, much less dissent, within her party or government — or,
indeed, far more troubling, in the State. If Mr. Dinesh Trivedi was
unceremoniously sacked as Union Railway Minister for not toeing her line
on the Union Railway budget, Damayanti Sen, the feisty, young Joint
Commissioner of Police, Kolkata, who cracked the Park Street rape case,
was shunted out to an obscure job for proving Ms Banerjee wrong: her
first response to the rape charge and, indeed, news of infant cradle
deaths, was that they had been “manufactured to malign her government.”
Newspaper issue
Now that intolerance has spread to the wider world: last month,
government libraries were told to purchase only eight newspapers — those
taken off the list were those critical of her actions and policies, as
they prevented “freethinking” among readers. In future, she said, she
might even ask people to stop buying certain newspapers “because a
conspiracy is going on against us.” The newspapers that offended her
included the top-selling Ananda Bazaar Patrika, The Telegraph and Bartaman: interestingly, Bartaman,
whose strident anti-Left stance played a leading role in bringing the
Trinamool to power, is now running stories highly critical of Ms
Banerjee. Later, under pressure, five newspapers — a Nepali daily, two
Bengali dailies, and The Times of India — were restored to the
“government” list. An embarrassed Library Services Minister Abdul Karim
Chowdhary said the government had not imposed censorship or banned the
big papers, it only wished to promote small newspapers.
But to the “freethinking” reading public, it is more than apparent that
those that made the cut in the first list were all pro-government: one
such Bengali newspaper is owned by a Trinamool Rajya Sabha MP, whose
associate editor, Kunal Ghosh, is among the three journalists recently
elected to the upper house of Parliament on the party ticket. For Ms
Banerjee, the switch from goddess-status to a daily scrutiny of her
actions has been a rude shock, as all through her opposition years, she
depended heavily on media support. Today, it's well-known in Kolkata's
political circles that she looks to a chosen group of journalists,
including the new Rajya Sabha MPs, rather than her political colleagues,
for advice on all issues.
Unfortunately, for her, some of these “advisers” are now coming under
the scanner as one of them works for a chain of media outfits backed by a
chit fund, the subject of an ongoing controversy. Last September,
Trinamool MP Somen Mitra wrote to Dr. Singh, urging action against chit
funds channelling money into real estate, film production, the hotel
business — and the media. He also alleged that these chit funds were
prospering, thanks to political patronage, with some owners even in
Parliament. Last month, Congress MP A.H. Khan Chowdhury wrote a similar
letter to Dr. Singh, asking for an investigation into the activities of
these chit funds. Indeed, the link between hot money and media
organisations backing Ms Banerjee's government is now an open secret in
Kolkata.
In the dying days of the Left Front government in West Bengal, the CPI (M)'s harmad sena,
or goon squads rampaging through its villages, came to symbolise its 34
years. Today, those goon squads have switched political allegiance to
her Trinamool. If the violence continues unabated — with the Left now at
the receiving end — intolerance of any criticism of the new government
has added a fresh dimension to the State's politics. “Harmad theke unmad (from
unmitigated violence to untempered madness”) is the despairing phrase
most used on Kolkata's streets to describe the prevailing situation in
Bengal.
The middle class that turned the tide of public opinion in the Trinamool's favour is angry.
Writer Mahasweta Devi, among those who had backed Ms Banerjee, recently
said: “Dictatorship has never worked. It has neither worked in Hitler's
Germany nor did it work in Mussolini's Italy.” Ms Banerjee needs to heed
those words: for even if her popularity is still intact in rural
Bengal, recent events represent the thin end of the wedge.
smita.g@thehindu.co.in
