Here’s what’s wrong with our new ‘LeLi’ poster person

First of all, let’s give credit where it’s due. There is much that is ‘right’ with Mahua Moitra. Right not in the ideological or political sense. For she is as ‘LeLi’ (Left Liberal) as they get. Her fiery and courageous — yes, it must be admitted — maiden speech in parliament made that amply clear. Fortified with both Hindi and Urdu poetry cleverly referencing if not copying, bullet points from a Holocaust memorial poster, peppering polemics with ‘factoids’ however one-sided or out of context, standing up even if somewhat shrilly to treasury bench heckling, Moitra certainly made her presence felt in well-articulated and nicely accented English. 

Accolades and encomiums followed thick and fast: ‘Stunningly clear-eyed articulation,’ ‘Go Moitra go,’ ‘Inspired, impassioned and combative maiden speech,’ ‘May her tribe increase,’ ‘Absolutely brilliant stuff,’ ‘Sizzling maiden speech,’ ‘Awesome, fearless, factual and flawless,’ and so on, best be summed up in one rah-rah remark: ‘Speech of the year.’ A gushing fanboy must have momentarily forgotten that we’ve just about crossed the half-way mark of the year. So there’s much scope still for parliamentary pyrotechnics. 

With all this going in her favour, what’s the wrong with Mahua? Without mincing words, I would call it the blindness of the sighted. After all, wasn’t it she who fulminated, ‘Open your eyes…(the) country is being torn apart’? I would retort, ‘Open your eyes, Mahua Moitra…it is not India, but West Bengal that is burning.’ For, clearly, not the country or its populace is blindfolded; it is Moitra herself. She suffers from a deadly optical and cognitive impairment: let’s call it ‘blinkered vision.’ So hamstrung is she by her own ideological investments that she may be incapable of genuine regard for reality. 

Though Moitra admitted to the ‘overwhelmingness’ [sic] of the BJP mandate, she did not care properly to investigate its reasons. Like other teeth-gnashers, naysayers, and chest-beaters, she demonised the BJP’s victory as ‘nothing short of early signs of fascism.’ Sorry, Ms. Moitra, but the psephology-defying cum resounding pro-incumbency mandate cannot be dismissed or explained away by your own ideological delusions. Stuck as you are in the agitprop sloganeering of another era, you seem to have utterly missed the significance of the people’s verdict. Yes, a new nationalism is sweeping across India, but it is not proto-fascism. Rather, it is inclusive Hindutva and developmental nationalism. Wake up and smell the coffee. 

But the greatest irony of Ms. Moitra’s speech, which I have hinted at, is that nearly all the ‘early warning signs of fascism’ which Moitra attributes to BJP-led India more aptly apply to TMC’s rampant misrule in Bengal under Mamata Banerjee. Offensive minority appeasement, Hindu-hatred purely for political gains, allergy to ‘Jai Sri Ram,’ lawless lumpenism bordering on goonda-raj, muzzling of the press and FoE, disdain for human rights, constitutionally calamitous defiance of central government authority by the state machinery — to name just a few of the glaring problems of West Bengal — Moitra seems deliberately if not congenitally blind to all these. Indeed, if she had so much as criticised Mamata I would have respected her more.

For it is her own home state that is on the verge of a dark abyss of civil war and chaos. Do I exaggerate? Surely nearly not as much as Moitra. Perhaps, a dose of her own medicine might temper her strident self-righteousness, compulsive virtue-signalling, and ideological grandstanding. None of these, alas, will serve the nation’s interests. No doubt, India does need an effective and principled opposition. But will the likes of Moitra, however gifted or determined, fit the bill? Not if they are more interested in attracting cascades of compliments from morally bankrupt and loserly ‘LeLis’. 

Moitra, a former Congress apparatchik, might have found her métier in Mamata Banerjee’s off-shoot or should I say ‘grassroot’ party. But her blanket dismissal and defamation of an elected government shows dangerous anti-democratic tendencies. As if only what she or others of her elite ilk, whether they be the ‘Khan Market gang’ or ‘Ballygunge Bhadraloks,’ certify as politically correct qualifies as truly democratic. It is this arrogant misconception, combined with the ressentiment of the left-behind, that is as pathetic as it is useless. No wonder the acting Speaker, Suresh Kodikunnil, allowed Moitra to shoot the breeze as it were with avuncular benignity. Almost like a concession to the brilliant head girl in a convent school delivering a prize-winning peroration in an elocution competition. 

Parliament is a talking shop. This ‘head girl’ may have carried away the prize yesterday, but the hard work of the Lok Sabha after her impassioned, if entertainingly misplaced aside, must go on. It will be carried forward not by the likes of Moitra, but by the real winners of India’s political sweepstakes — the National Democratic Alliance led by PM Narendra Damodardas Modi of the BJP.

The author is Director, IIAS, Shimla