Mamata Banerjee, daughter courageous

Mamata Banerjee did not study at Presidency College or Lady Brabourne College, unlike former West Bengal chief ministers from Dr Prafulla Chandra Ghosh, who even taught there in the 1920s, to Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee. She grew up synergistically with the rise of the poor and lower middle-class people, the base of her party, the All India Trinamool Congress.

The synonym of Trinamool is grassroots. The prefix Trinamool hyphenates her from the well-dressed and well-fed followers of the CPI(M), reflecting the overgrowth of 34 years of crude Left establishmentarianism.

Mamata’s USP is her indomitable spirit and uprightness. Her journey began on the day she became an MP, defeating a stalwart like Somnath Chatterjee. But the battle for liberating the oppressed thousands under Left opportunism kicked off with her amazing feat of fearlessness on 16 August 1990 in south Calcutta, when the WBPCC gave a call for Bangla bandh. She was badly beaten up by CPI(M) workers. Laloo Alam, who was then a office-bearer in the DYFI, the CPI(M)’s youth wing, and was photographed trying to hit her with a stick, in an interview on May 16, 2011, says he was framed but disclosed that the party biggies hatched a plan to kill her. Mamata had fallen unconscious with serious head injury and was rushed to hospital where she received 46 stitches.

Prize-winning Bengali novelist Suchitra Bhattacharya compares Mamata with Nandini, the lead character in Rabindranath Tagore’s Raktakarabi (Red Oleanders). Radhiga Priyadharshini, in her The Royal Metaphor in the Plays of Rabindranath Tagore, describes Raktakarabi as “an apocalyptic play that deals with the conflict between liberty and tyranny”. This unique drama depicts Nandini in conflict with the King of Yaksha and his men.

Mamata, wrote Bhattacharya, “rose resiliently step by step, breaking our prolonged inability to speak out, gave a try to demolish the system and gradually gathered strength. She was dragged away from Singur (by the police and CPI-M cadres) and threatened to be thrown into the river Ganga. We, educated lots of the middle strata, do not know that power was switched off to cane unarmed and innocent commoners black and blue. But this lady braved all odds to rush to the spot and stood by them. Her emotions led her to go to spots of murders, torched slums and the like, only to be with the affected”.

Cowardice, luxury and greed are not in Mamata’s dictionary, at least to date. She is contemptuously derided by the nouveau riche among the white collar workers of banks, financial institutions, central government undertakings and government departments for her inarticulate language but her lingua franca — often grammatically deficient —raises aspirations among “the wretched of the earth” who became disillusioned with the pseudo-revolutionism of officially Marxist parties like the CPI(M), CPI and even some variants of CPI(M-L).

Prof Asru Kumar Sikdar, one of the best-known living Bengali essayists, argues that she did not have any godfather. “Neither is she the daughter or widow of any celebrated leader… (She is rather) looked down upon as one of the ‘women of domestic-help class’. Yet, she has single-handedly shaken the patriarchal, ideology-fostered Left Front, led by the CPI(M). This is really a phenomenon. And the person who has consolidated the rise of the subalterns and antipathy of the people against the CPI(M) into a solid mass, deserves serious attention.”

Those who envision “hidden seeds of fascism” in Mamata - including Sikdar - go for the obvious: her megalomaniac aberrations notwithstanding. This is run-of-the-mill analysis of fascism which is, as legendary British communist of Indian origin Rajani Palme Dutt succinctly defined as

“dictatorship of finance capital… antithetical to everything of substance within the liberal tradition”.

Indian capitalism is not yet dominated by finance capital, despite the bureaucratic endeavour to get fully woven into Fund-Bank liberalism. The huge mandate in favour of Daughter Couragous reflects the people’s wishes to give the new alternative a chance. For the last three-and-a-half decades, partyocracy of the CPI(M) blocked all the roads from clubs, cities, towns, villages and hamlets; from office corridors, universities and colleges and declared that ‘I am the monarch of all I survey, I am the nation and I am the society’.

The people felt interned and suffocated. It’s for the Left rank-and-file to consider whether the change will help them let the flab comprising opportunists and sycophants go. There is, of course, every risk the Left’s unwillingness to change and the consequences thereof. We, the people, can only hope for the best and prepare for the worst.