Should anyone outside West Bengal ever happen to hear Mamata Banerjee address her constituents this season, they’ll surely get confused.
Should anyone outside West Bengal ever happen to hear Mamata Banerjee address her constituents this season, they’ll surely get confused. Instead of laying out her plans as a Lok Sabha MP, Mamata will launch a tirade against the state government on every local issue, making the listener feel that she’s probably campaigning for the state Assembly elections.
“Mone rakhben Lok Sabhate CPI(M)-er jato seat kombe tatoi Pashim Bange bidhan sabha election egiye ashbe, jekhane CPI(M) dhuye-muche saf hoye jabe. Du hajar egaro parjanta apekkha karte hobe na. (The fewer CPI(M) candidates you elect to Lok Sabha, the earlier will assembly elections be held. You will not have to wait till 2011. The CPI-M will be thrown out of Bengal before that).
This is a strange way of going about a Lok Sabha campaign but this is what Mamata has been reiterating at every Trinamool rally that she attends. Incidentally, assembly elections in the state are scheduled for 2011.
Barring the days she has to go on tours of the district, Mamata starts her campaign generally at 11.30. Clad in a white cotton saree and rubber slippers, she prefers interacting with people by walking through the lanes and bylanes in scorching heat, surrounded by her trusted lieutenants.
In her roadshows, Mamata adopts an interactive approach with the audience. “Ki CPI(M)-ke Bangla theke hatathe hobe to? (Don’t we need to push CPI(M) out of Bengal?” A loud ‘yes’ lights up her face, a muted one makes her ask, “Eto ashte keno” (Why so softly?).
Whatever her ultimate goal, subtle differences in her campaigning style in urban and rural areas shows that Mamata’s has become a seasoned politician. In urban areas, including her constituency of Kolkata (South), she consciously avoids any talk of land acquisition for industries. Her slogans mainly ask for a change in government, the reopening of closed factories and opposition against the ban of two-stroke auto-rickshaws in the city.
However, when she steps into rural areas, Mamata pulls out her firebrand image, shouting her hoarse against industrial land acquisition. Her slogan, wherever she goes is “to covert Kolkata into London, Digha into Goa and north Bengal into Switzerland.”
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