As the net seems to be closing in on West Bengal’s beleaguered Chief Minister, there is still no evidence that voters have abandoned her or that her Trinamool Congress’s Maa, Mati, Manush mantra has lost its magic. There are many reasons for being disappointed in Mamata Banerjee’s government, but the arrest of Srinjoy Bose, a high profile Trinamool Congress member of the Rajya Sabha and scion of an old established Bengali family, isn’t one of them.
The arrest reminded me of something Dr Jack Preger, a British doctor who lived in Kolkata for many years, once told me. He worked among street children and founded the relief agency, Calcutta Rescue. Dr Preger said he didn’t get the appropriate work permit for India because he wanted to be arrested and jailed. In his view, no one had achieved anything in the subcontinent without first going to prison. “Look at Mahatma Gandhi, Nehru and all the other nationalist leaders!” he said.
Whether or not jail is a badge of honour, not much stigma attaches nowadays to the mere facts of arrest and imprisonment. There’s the legacy of the freedom struggle when men and women courted arrest. People are also aware that the police, and perhaps some other investigating agencies no longer enjoy impeccable reputations. The restraint the Supreme Court has placed on the Central Bureau of Investigation’s scope of inquiries in the 2G Spectrum allocation is compounded by controversy about its director, Ranjit Sinha.
The combined effect is that very few persons expect Didi, elder sister, as Banerjee is called, to resign just because of Bose’s arrest. Earlier, another Trinamool MP, Kunal Ghose, was arrested, but the party lost no time in expelling him from its ranks. The arrest of a retired director-general of police, Rajat Mazumdar, is also not directly linked in the popular mind with Banerjee’s performance in office.
Yet, there is no denying there are many reasons for dissatisfaction with Didi. Some visible, if largely cosmetic improvements in Kolkata have not realised the poriborton – change – she promised. Industry continues to avoid West Bengal. Constant skirmishing indicates deteriorating law and order. Reports suggest a drift towards authoritarianism with debate suppressed and dissent stifled. Civil servants say what their political masters wish to hear, or are penalised. If bureaucrats are inactive, the police is often hyperactive in pursuing people who are not sufficiently respectful to Didi. Her nephew, Abhishek Banerjee, a Trinamool MP, is emerging as an important power centre.
These are all matters that a political opposition should take up politically. They do not justify the mounting demand on TV channels and in drawing rooms for her resignation, which suggests confusion between morality and politics. We don’t live any longer in the age that applauded Lal Bahadur Shastri for accepting moral responsibility for a train accident and quitting as railway minister. Someone who does so today would probably be written off as too naïve for the political hurly burly! Morality serves a political purpose nowadays. When Arjun Singh demanded P V Narasimha Rao should quit after the Babri Masjid was demolished, it was not so much because of any outrage to his secular principles as because he hankered for the prime minister’s job.
Invariably, those who cite moral reasons for political action have a partisan axe to grind. The BJP, Congress and Left activists who are baying most loudly for Banerjee’s head hope to gain through the ponzi scandal what they failed to win in the election. The BJP, which has made some gains in the state and now has two MPs, would probably advocate central action to force out the Chief Minister if she doesn’t leave voluntarily.
Didi, being a fighter, knows the Saradha scam hasn’t yet generated widespread anger in the bustees and villages where she draws support. Indian voters have become so cynical they don’t expect much integrity in their leaders. Perhaps some people even agree with Trinamool’s spokesman, Derek O’Brien, that the CBI is an instrument of the BJP’s vendetta to bring a feisty state government to heel. A government-opposition quarrel has become a centre-state dispute, with Trinamool giving the BJP a taste of its own medicine in disrupting parliamentary work.
Actually, Trinamool blamed the centre for the scam long before the present histrionics. Banerjee argued in an article in her party journal late last year that New Delhi had caused it by reducing the rate of interest for post office small savings, thereby forcing the poor to look elsewhere. Insult was added to injury in her view when the agents’ commission was also reduced.
If the combined effect was to drive people into the arms of unscrupulous chit fund operators, it’s for the Centre, she says, and its various agencies to clean up the mess. That doesn’t of course excuse chit fund companies (or anyone else for that matter) winning political favours through handsome bribes. It is only another dimension of the corruption that vitiates all spheres of public life.
A distinction must be drawn between Didi and her party. When she swept like a tornado through the state to drive out the Left Front, she seemed possessed of a demonic force. The men and woman who clambered aboard her bandwagon had none of that mesmerising compulsion.Those businessmen, writers, artists, actors and civil servants would just as happily serve the Left Front, Congress or the BJP if they were adequately rewarded. No wonder the chief minister treats her party with contempt.
At the other end of the scale, the lumpen followers of the Left parties now follow the Trinamool star. So, instead of a ruling party with a coherent ideology and a structured organisation, West Bengal has only the rag-tag camp followers of a leader once deemed charismatic.
This kind of political stalemate can be resolved only through political means. It would be a colossal mistake for the Centre to step in for while governance may be ineffective, there has been no breakdown.
But there are grievances and the democratic answer would be for the opposition parties to take them up and mobilise opinion if they can. There is also the security angle. A genuine case for central intervention could be made out if it is proved that the Burdwan blasts were the result of the state government’s negligence or identity politics.
The worry is that all this political excitement distracts attention from the distress of the more than 17 lakh people , who misguidedly (or greedily) entrusted their savings to the more than 200 companies in the Saradha Group before it collapsed last year. Only about five lakh victims are believed to have received some compensation from the fund the state government set up. Their welfare matters more than the ruckus in Parliament.
Sunanda K Datta-Ray
