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Why Mamata is rewriting Lalu’s CV

Mamata doesn’t want her record judged by what her predecessor ‘achieved’.

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It’s well known that Mamata Banerjee’s chief bugbear is the Left. But ever since she took over as railway minister in the Manmohan Singh government’s second term, she has trained her guns on predecessor Lalu Prasad with equal ferocity.

In four months, she has overturned five of Lalu’s decisions, announced a white paper on railway finances, set up a panel to review his public-private partnership schemes and called for a CBI inquiry into recruitments during his regime. Her latest salvo is the move to scrap the railways accounts chair at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, which Lalu had announced after the IIM praised his railways turnaround story.

The tenacity with which she has gone about undoing Lalu’s legacy has taken the Congress by surprise, but with so much at stake in West Bengal, where it hopes to unseat the Left with Mamata’s help in 2011, the party has chosen to look the other way. In any case, who can restrain Mamata?

Her colleagues in the Trinamool Congress acknowledge that Lalu is a victim of Mamata’s highly personalised style of politics.  

 If she is to be the queen of Indian Railways, she must first demolish the king, which is why she is focusing on erasing Lalu’s larger-than-life footprint from the ministry.
“After Mamatadi took over, she found that her own record as railway minister (in the Vajpayee government) had been wiped from people’s memory, and there was an immediate comparison to Lalu Yadav,” said a senior leader of Trinamool.

“She found that she had to separate the propaganda from the facts if she wanted her term as minister to be judged fairly,” he added. She was aided in this by former railway ministers and other political opponents of Lalu. They were only too happy to help her unravel the myth that had been built around the RJD chief, who left the ministry as one of its most successful chiefs in recent decades.

It was former railway minister Nitish Kumar who asked for a closer look at railway finances to question the turnaround story. And it was former petroleum minister Ram Naik of the BJP who exposed the fact that Lalu had managed a golden pass for free railway travel for his whole family as a last act of government largesse.

In her first budget speech, Mamata announced a white paper on railway accounts, raising questions about the great Indian Railways turnaround. And then she cancelled the Golden Pass.

While the battle may be highly personal, there seems to be a political element, too, fuelled by Lalu’s growing closeness to Mamata’s hated opponents, the Left. “During Lalu’s tenure, CPI(M) MP Basudeb Acharia was the chairman of the standing committee on railways in Parliament. And he was party to a lot of decisions taken by the railways in the last five years. From there it was a simple case: discredit the performance of the last five years to discredit the CPI(M),” said the Trinamool leader to who DNA spoke to.

Another Trinamool Congress spokesperson, Sudeep Bandyopadhyaya, however, maintained that attacking Lalu Prasad was not Banerjee’s intention. “That is your opinion and wild allegations. She is just going about her business. If she does not agree to certain things that he has done, then it is her right to set them right,” he says.

The target of all this, Lalu Prasad, was at first bewildered and is now a little angry at Banerjee’s actions. “I have done presentations on how I managed the turnaround for the PMO and to Harvard. Now somebody comes and says that it’s all rubbish. I am not afraid of any enquiry. Karne dijiye (let them do it),” he said.

Quote
After Mamata-di took over, she found that her own record as railway minister (in the Vajpayee government) had been wiped from people’s memory, and there was an immediate comparison to Lalu Yadav. She had to separate propaganda from fact if she wanted her second term as minister to be judged fairly
- A Trinamool leader
 
I have done presentations on how I managed the (railways) turnaround for the PMO and to Harvard. Now somebody comes and says that it’s all rubbish. I am not afraid of any enquiry. Karne dijiye (let them do it).
 
- Lalu Prasad

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