Mamata’s Trinamool goes off the wagon

It is only predictable that a rookie Trinamool Congress railways minister will turn to Rabindranath Tagore for some poetic spine when presenting his first budget. Even more predictably, though, Dinesh Trivedi chose to recite the usual Mind-is-without-fear routine. At a time when his party has left the centre terrorised and at the edge of its slippery seat, the irony could not have been lost on his colleagues.

Trivedi himself, however, didn’t seem to have imbibed all of Tagore’s wisdom. His budget speech was first punctuated by many a sycophantic reference to his predecessor and party boss, Mamata Banerjee, and the budget itself might now strangely be punctured by her. A required fare hike that had taken a decade to defeat populism is now being challenged by the Trinamool itself as anti-people.

It is indeed possible that the inclusion of the hike was nothing but a gesture of petty choreographed politics that would give this aspiring national party yet another opportunity to prove its mass-friendly credentials. Or another more logical explanation could be that the honourable Trivedi got carried away in Delhi and went rogue. The high praise he dished out could have just been a careful veil. Either way, it’s clear the Trinamool has introduced a discourse to regional and national politics in recent months that is shrill, confused, and sometimes improper.

Apart from the grating voice of Mamata Banerjee, Kolkata today has another obvious signifier — a harried Vidya Balan roaming its streets. Now this might make for an imperfect analogy, but in a scene from the increasingly popular Kahaani, an eerie assassin almost pushes a much pregnant Balan onto a metro rail track. He pulls her back just in time. The Congress does seem quite as unnerved as Balan, expectant with unjustified hope, but missing all the promise of its political consummation in 2009. The Trinamool, on the other hand, is doing a fine job of playing tug of war, a game that allows it to add 50 new services to the Kolkata Metro in the 2012-2013 rail budget, but one that also lets them throw the central government under the proverbial train each time there’s a tentative announcement.

There is obviously a certain degree of adulation that we must reserve for the rebel, especially when the object of animosity is a floundering government that refuses to shed its performance of arrogance. But in Mamata Banerjee’s ways, there seems an obvious lack of private reason and an overemphasis on public belligerence. The amendment to the president’s address that has been tabled by Trinamool MP Kalyan Banerjee is unacceptable to the Congress, but Mamata is clearly not going to drop the issue of NCTC that easily. For those waiting for dirty linen to be washed, tracking Mamatadi’s absences in Delhi provides fair fodder. The one thing that the West Bengal CM has done is to make front pages of broadsheets read like the page 3 of gossip supplements. Didi wasn’t at the PM’s dinner! How SRK and Salman is that?

Mamatadi often cites pressing work back home as an excuse to give occasions such as ritualistic swearing-ins a miss. But back in Kolkata, the symbol of change is herself seeing a transformation, and she isn’t looking pretty. Everyone from pavement dwellers, taxi-drivers and comfortable industrialists are peeved by the lack of metamorphosis, but more importantly, by the continuance of governmental narcissism. Banerjee went on record to describe charges of rape in the state as conspiracies against her government. She left Calcuttans foxed by a decision to paint the city blue, forcing some to swap her moniker from ‘mercurial’ to ‘disturbed’. Before West Bengal went to the polls Singur and Nandigram gave Trinamool a voice that sounded liberal, but it seems there will be no escape from the Left’s monologues of monotony and violence. History is just insistent on repeating itself.

Much of Trivedi’s budget speech concentrated on elements of safety, but with the Trinamool in the mix, nothing and no one ever is. With calls for his resignation having reached a fever pitch, it is only a matter of time before Trivedi is officially pushed off the wagon. Mamata Banerjee and her displeasure are both akin to the duronto themselves. They are new, quick and waiting to cover the length of the country. But while the train is getting faster, Mamata Banerjee is getting more fastidious, forcing us all to slacken our individual pace a little. It is a cliché, yes, but even if he has to pay more, the man who seems to always lose to a regressive politics is the Indian traveller.