It is not difficult to rationalise what was brewing in the mind of West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee when she decided to spend the whole of Thursday at the State secretariat in a protesting mood. Her accusation that the Centre was trying to intimidate the State by stationing Army trucks on national highways and at toll plazas and her raising the spectre of a “civil war” sounded utterly implausible. That Mamata dug her heels in and refused to leave the secretariat until the Army trucks moved off the road was a crass display of theatrics which has been her style even in yesteryears when she was being schooled in politics at the time of CPM rule as a Congress activist. It was her identification with the common man, coupled with her ability to pick up seemingly trivial issues and blow them up beyond all proportions that catapulted her to centrestage and helped her vanquish the mighty Marxists. Today, as she looks invincible, winning election after election, she still makes use of those exaggerated mannerisms to win a battle with her adversaries. And why not, because it works.
While an Army spokesperson denied that there was anything sinister in the deployment of some soldiers at toll gates and insisted that it was a “routine” three-day exercise held annually by the Eastern Command to get statistical data on trucks that might need to be requisitioned during a contingency, leaders of the Trinamool Congress said they had not seen anything “of this scale ever in Bengal.” Mamata, from whom her partymen invariably take the cue, contended that the “interference” in the State’s affairs was worse than what had happened during the state of Emergency in the 1970s. She articulated her thoughts when she told a leading newspaper: “This move is undemocratic, unethical unconstitutional and politically motivated. I head an elected government and I am guarding democracy in Bengal. I won’t hand it over to the Army.” As a shrewd tactician she knows that such bravado works well with the masses. The Army spokesperson, however, pointed out that vehicles are checked for basic parameters like make and load capacity. They are then marked so that the next checkpoint knows that the vehicle has already been checked.
Trinamool leaders in Parliament led by Derek O’Brian did not allow the Rajya Sabha to function as they protested over Central highhandedness and warned that other states would be harassed likewise and that it could lead to civil war. These are evidently figments of her imagination and it is to be hoped that better sense would prevail. Right since the current session of Parliament began Ms Banerjee has been on the warpath. Her vehement opposition to the demonetisation move made many wonder whether she had a vested interest in opposing it. Mamata Banerjee is also piqued and believes that the BJP took undue interest in spreading doubts about her integrity when the Saradha chit fund scam broke on the West Bengal scene over three years ago. But the BJP efforts to carve out a strong base in Bengal came a cropper when the Lok Sabha and Assembly polls in West Bengal showed that her support had not diminished. Her refusal to have the Left parties working alongside her on demonetisation was a reminder that she does not forget easily those who rubbed her on the wrong side.
While Mamata’s team in Parliament has been upping the ante on the demonetisation issue, the big hullabaloo over the denial of urgent landing for a commercial flight in which she was recently returning from Patna has also created a political storm. It is being claimed that the aircraft had just seven or eight minutes of fuel but was not allowed to land forthwith on high priority. While motives are being attributed to the BJP, the party and the concerned airline have denied that there was any crisis in the air.
It is ironic, indeed, that relations between Mamata and Modi have deteriorated to such an extent that there is so much bad blood between the two. They need to mend fences so that there is at least a working relationship between the two states. As things stand, there is a feeling that Mamata Banerjee is nursing ambitions of sitting on the prime ministerial ‘gaddi’ after elections are held for the Lok Sabha in 2019. That explained her extreme annoyance with Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar for having supported the Modi government at the Centre on the demonetisation principle while he opposed the poor implementation of the scheme in practice. She apparently sees Nitish as a rival to her in donning the leadership mantle as the Opposition’s nominee in the elections to the Lok Sabha. All in all, Mamata is on a strong wicket in her state but her mercurial style puts off those who she plans to do business with to strive for the prime ministerial chair.
