by Biswajit Roy
Is Mamata still Bengal's Joan of Arc? Has she turned into a female version of Caligula, at least, halfway through the transformation?
After a year of ‘Paribartan' in Bengal, the non-CPM Left and Left-leaning members of the civil society in the State appear to be divided on this question as they differ in their attitudes to Mamata Banerjee, her government and her party, the Trinamul Congress.
The crux of the debate is whether there is any perceived or real ‘Leftward shift' in Mamata's political convictions vis-à-vis the Congress on national issues and how to maintain the distance from the CPM while criticising her increasingly undemocratic moves in her home turf.
Not only do the Naxalite groups and other smaller Left parties, which had joined the regime-changing campaign after Singur and Nandigram, suffer from a sense of dilemma, the dilemma over the Mamata rule also affects the CPM allies in the Left Front. Critical of the Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee Government's pro-corporate land grab, these LF partners had almost found an agony aunt in Mamata in their fight against the big brother before they fell together.
For that matter, the CPM, still licking its electoral wounds, is divided on whether the time is ripe to go for a full steam attack on the Mamata Government. This underlines the fact of confusion and division across the entire spectrum of Left politics and Mamata must be enjoying it.
Mamata's Leftward Shift?
Those who are still sailing with Mamata focus on her increasing clash with the Congress-led Centre on assorted neo-liberal economic policies and infringement of the States' rights in the name of reforms and national security.
They cite, for example, Mamata's opposition to the Centre's proposed legislations which leave room for the government's land acquisition for the private sector in the garb of public interest while allowing the corporate agribusiness to make hay through speculative forward trading in foodgrains. Her resistance to the UPA Government's move to open up the domestic retail market further to global multi-brand retail behemoths like Wal-Mart following relentless US pressure is being mentioned as another proof of her Left credentials. Her refusal to go for a backdoor settlement with the Tata Motors on the Singur land despite the prodding from corporate lobbies and a powerful section of the media also earned her laurels from this quarter.
They also refer to her refusal to allow the Home Ministry to bring the proposed National Counter-Terrorism Centre under the Intelligence Bureau, which enjoys impunity from legislative scrutiny. Mamata's refusal to hike railway passenger fares and her street march in protest against the petrol-price hike, despite pressure from the Congress and indignation of the corporate media and market pundits against her ‘populism', are also considered milestones in her pro-people politics.
The Manmohon Singh-Pranab Mukherjee duo's reluctance to bail out the fund-starved Mamata Government by sanctioning a three-year moratorium on the payment of Central loans is being interpreted as an arms-twisting tactics in response to her refusal to fall in line on economic reforms. They say these examples suffice to underline her Leftward shift, more steadfast and sustained than the CPM which had a record of doublespeak in Kolkata and Delhi on FDI and pro-corporate moves when the party ruled the roost in Bengal.
But those who are not in the charmed circle of ‘Didi' Number One, find more ‘populist posturing' and political bargaining in her anti-Centre, anti-Congress politics than any coherent and well-thought-out Left conviction. As she is missing the wood for the trees, Mamata neither planned any organised campaign against these policies in Bengal nor tried to rally like-minded forces at the national level on these issues.
For them, her politics is aimed at occupying both the ruling and Opposition space in order to enjoy the best of the both the worlds—power and popularity. They think that her brinkmanship to stop Pranab Mukherjee's race to Raisina Hill was purely personal since she did not articulate her opposition to him on economic and political grounds. With her ‘painful' but face-saving move to accept the Congress' wish, Mamata's ego-trip ended in a whimper proving her to be a temperamental but inconsistent politician, they complain.
It is another matter that Prakash Karat succumbed to the divide-the-enemy tactics of Alimuddin Street by de-linking the CPM's support to Mukherjee, one of the main architects of the neo-liberal regime, from the party's “principled” opposition to the Congress' economic policies. But Mamata's last-minute sense of realpolitik has landed Karat and the ‘wedge-driving' brigade from Bengal in a soup. Both Sonia Gandhi and Mamata revealed their own compulsions to sail together till the 2014 parliamentary polls despite mutual misgivings.
Biman Bose-Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee's hopes to regain power by resuming their rendezvous with the Congress, sans sincere atonement for the sins of Singur-Nandigram and clearing the Aegean stable created by 34 years of ‘feudal-Stalinist' practices (credit for the coinage goes to Prabhat Patnaik), were clearly misplaced.
The Dilemma
The mutual discomfort of these strange bedfellows notwithstanding, the dilemma of the non-CPM Left is likely to linger longer. Even if Mamata's anti-Congress politics is informed by a Leftward shift to pro-people policies, should they ignore Mamata's zero tolerance of differences and criticism? Can they condone the growing imposition of Trinamul hegemony and increasing attacks on democratic rights of all the Opposition forces including those who had been friendly to her before the Assembly polls?
If they do, they run the risk of losing their own democratic credentials. If they do not, they are vulnerable to the ruling party's charges of helping the CPM's return to power forgetting its misdeeds. Nevertheless, for many members of the pro-Paribatan civil society, the choice is becoming narrower and they cannot afford to remain fence-sitters.
Irrespective of their ideological roots and political leanings, most of them had longed for an end to the one-party rule, partisan administration and a pluralist democracy, not only in the political arena but also in other walks of public life. But a growing number of them have been disappointed following Mamata's intolerance to any criticism and her arrogant and I-know-cure-for-all-maladies attitude. The occasions for her repeated public outburst of self-righteous anger to doubters and refusal to pay heed even to well-meaning critics are too many to ignore. More worrisome is the cult of worship and unquestioning compliance that has been created around Mamata by her cheerleaders in the media, civil society and ruling party.
No doubt that the recent Assembly by-polls and civic polls in a few areas have indicated her almost intact support base. Her austere lifestyle, personal honesty, raw energy and hard work are imitable for her colleagues in the Cabinet and others who are in public life. Nevertheless, her almost daily self-congratulatory claims—of already having solved almost all the vexed problems in the State—have few takers. Except those who consider her a lady Midas, most feel that her understanding of problems and administrative acumen are shallow and super-fluous.
Attacks on Democratic Rights
One may remember her intemperate labelling of the participants in the CNN-IBN live show as ‘Maoists and CPM chums' as soon as they had questioned her about the Trinamul Ministers and leaders' interference in college administration and abusive treatment to a lady teacher. So outraged was the Chief Minister by the audacity of these questioners that she left the programme in a huff accusing the organisers of assembling her detractors deliberately. This was not an one-off occasion.
She sniffed a conspiracy in the circulation of political cartoons lampooning her government in social networking websites. She lauded her supporters for publicly thrashing a Jadavpur University professor and justified his arrest by the pliant police for forwarding an ‘obscene' cartoon on Facebook. The cartoon, which alluded to her replacement of recalcitrant Dinesh Trivedi by her Man Friday Mukul Roy as the Railway Minister, had nothing obscene.
It hardly matters that most of her Net-savvy CPM critics lack the gift of wit and finesse that makes the difference between a brilliant cartoon and crude hate campaign. But her top cops dutifully echoed her thunder against the cyber-critics. Later they repeatedly stopped the service of a group SMS news provider, Dodhichi, calling it a Maoist campaign.
Mamata, however, has found the utility of Twitter and Facebook in the aftermath of the cartoon controversy. She filled the cyber-walls with her covert tirade against the Congress by attacking the ‘Machiavellian palace politics and court politicians' following her row with Sonia Gandhi over Pranab's candidature.
However, her refusal to allow difference, not to speak of dissidence, is not limited to the cyber world. She tried to browbeat the Opposition-run and independent newspapers and TV channels through a government order to state-run and aided libraries that stipulated subscrip-tion to the mostly loyal media.
Three of her favoured journalists have been rewarded with Rajya Sabha seats whose papers crow for her. A few other privileged scribes have the access to her chamber at the State headquarters while their fellow-professionals are not even allowed to meet officials in the Chief Minister's Office at the back of the sanctum sanctorum without prior permission.
In her vengeance to pay back the CPM in its own coin, the Opposition leader in the State Assembly and his fellow MLAs have been denied the right to address reporters at the media centre in the Assembly premises when the House is not in session.
The tradition of forcible closure of Opposition party offices and intimidation of their supporters, particularly in the rural areas, continues while colleges and workplaces are witnessing bloody clashes over the control of unions. The new ruling party's factional conflicts over such control that often spills over the streets have only added to the dismay of those who had yearned for the end of political vendetta and one-party hegemony.
Outside the precincts of power hubs, Mamata's love for street politics may have remained undiminished. But she wants to rule the streets alone. It is now being made increasingly difficult to get police permission in Kolkata for rallies by disloyal forces, particularly the rights bodies and mass organisations, if they are suspected of being Maoist outfits or sympathetic to them.
Those who brought out processions or staged dharnas and demonstrations against the government's actions, no matter with or without permissions, were caned mercilessly and put behind bars. Among them are around 200 squatter families at Nonadanga, an area off the swanky part of Kolkata.
Nonadanga
Nonadanga, despite being much smaller in terms of area and the number of affected people, connects to anti-land grab movements in Singur and Nandigram as the same developmental violence on the poor by the government-ruling party combine is the key to the clashes here. Only the colours of the perpetrators have changed.
It may be an eye-opener for those who want to understand the differences and contradictions between macro policies and micro practices that actually shape the realpolitik at the ground level. Irrespective of the hollow promises in the pre-poll manifestos, the Nonadanga episode has revealed the dynamics of the change of the Trinamul's politics at the grassroots—from oppositional to governmental. That's why its is necessary to go into some details.
These squatters have been resisting the government-Trinamul joint eviction drive from a civic-agency land and demanding proper rehabilitation since the end of March. Many of these poor and marginal people are climate-refugees from the hurricane Aila-ravaged Sundarbans while others are poor migrants from far-flung districts.
Almost all have ended in the marshy, rugged land after failing to cope up with rising rents in the city slums. Most men earn a livelihood as day-labourers, masons and rickshaw-pullers while the women work as domestic helps, thus serving the real estate developers around the area and their upmarket and middle class clients. Most of these families had joined the Trinamul rallies before the polls as Mamata, in her Opposition avatar, had opposed similar evictions during the Left Front regime. But in the post-Paribartan days, Mamata's Urban Development Minister has moved to vacate the ground, which is part of 80 acres of land held by the Kolkata Metropolitan Development Authority.
Accordingly, bulldozers destroyed the Nonadanga shacks and some of them were gutted. The residents not only lost their homes and hearths but also their meagre savings and belongings. Still refusing to leave, the squatters are trying to survive within the walls that the KMDA has erected around the swampy field that has turned the place into a virtual concentration camp.
The KMDA is negotiating with private players to pursue its ‘development plans' that range from building shopping malls to medical tourism hub on this land. These will serve the posh private sector hospitals and hotels now dotting the once-sylvan wetland area in the city's eastern fringe.
Though most of the area is recognised as a Ramsar site crucial for the city's ecosystem, the real estate sharks in collusion with politicians, police and government-civic babudom have swallowed much of it since the LF years. The new dispensation seems to be following the mantle of the same developmentalism at the expense of the poor and environment. The recent mega-buck illumination of Kolkata by adding thousands of trident lamp-posts to already well-lit streets and the painting of government buildings with white and blue colours of Mamata's liking only revealed the government's priorities. It is not Nonadanga squatters alone; groups of shanty-dwellers and street vendors have been evicted from several areas in the city and suburbs in the post-poll months. The elitist urbanisation continues to expose its dark underbelly in Nonadanga. Around the occupied field, there are ramshackle apartment blocks, which were built by the LF Government to rehabilitate the earlier evictees from different parts of the city following political pressure and donor agency stipulations.
The Trinamul Urban Development Minister and his party minions have left no stone unturned to divide the current squatters and their rehabilitated neighbours and others who had managed better shelter on their own. The dirty politics of divide-and-rule continues.
What is queerer is that the Minister and his men have assured rehabilitation to the hapless squatters only if they shun the ‘trouble-mongering outsiders' and join the Trinamul. They actually echoed the CPM's sobriquet for Mamata in the Singur-Nandigram days.
For that matter, activists, who have been beaten up and jailed as suspected Maoists, include those who had joined Mamata's indefinite hunger strike during the Singur agitation. That did not stop her prosecutors to accuse these activists of stockpiling arms and ammunitions in the shacks of Nonadanga even if the police failed to recover any other missile except some bricks.
Nevertheless, squatters and activists have been caned and put behind bars in batches for various terms since April while two have been tagged further in Maoist cases related to Nandigram.
Only a year ago, the accused were considered among the friends of the Mamata camp when the CPM had mounted its campaign against the “Mamata-Maoist nexus” in the land war.
The memories of ‘Harmad' attacks on Mamata's rallies were resurrected when police stood mute spectators as the Trinamul supporters attacked members of the Association for Protection of Democratic Rights.
The latter had gathered at the Hazra crossing in South Calcutta, close to Mamata's residence to march in a procession to the Alipore court demanding release of activists arrested in connection with the Nonadanga eviction. This is the same road crossing where a near-fatal attack on Mamata by the CPM men in the early 1990s virtually changed the course of Bengal politics.
Junglemahal and Release of Political Prisoners
Neither Mamata nor the Maoists will now admit their rendezvous before the Assembly polls in Nandigram and Junglemahal. The half-hearted post-poll peace process between them ended in a bloody failure, thanks to the one-upmanship, arrogant and myopic politics of both the sides.
Consequently, Mamata has made a volte-face over her promises on release of political prisoners including the rank and file of the CPI (Maoist) as well as the party-dominated People's Committee against Police Atrocities.
While she had made the withdrawal of joint forces from Junglemahal contingent upon the Maoist abjuration of violence, the issue of the release of political prisoners was added to it covertly. PCAPA leader Chhatradhar Mahato, whom Mamata had joined publicly in the heydays of the Lalgarh movement, still rotted in jail. The prosecution opposed his petitions for the status of a political prisoner in the courts, despite contrary assurance from the government-appointed committee to review cases pertaining to political prisoners.
The committee has failed to deliver in the wake of her refusal to release her friends-turned-foes. Mahato is among the 90 suspected Maoists and their accomplices who were booked under draconian Unlawful Activities Prevention Act during the Left Front rule. More have been detained under the same law after the peace talks broke down.
The situation is almost similar with the SUCI detainees as the party has an on-and-off relation with Trinamul. On the other hand, the govern-ment's discriminatory treatment of political prisoners is evident from its move to release and withdraw cases against the Trinamul supporters in Singur and Nandigram. Some of the non-Trinamul detainees from North Bengal and Junglemahal have got bail, mostly after agreeing to abide by the ruling party's terms. That it cannot be dismissed as Opposition propaganda is proved by the pro-forma of written undertaking for continued allegiance to the Trinamul that has been circulated by the party MLAs in Junglemahal.
Chidambaram and Mamata seemed to be on the same wavelength now as far as the Maoists and their sympathisers are concerned. The stillborn peace process and subsequent stale-mate on the release of political prisoners have only succeeded in dividing the human rights movement in Bengal into largely pro- and anti-government sections, which are now bitterly accusing each other.
The Balance-sheet
Mamata's anniversary balance-sheet is mixed if we take into account her anti-corporate positions as well as her intolerance of any kind of dissenters, be they estranged allies like the singer-turned-party MP, Kabir Suman, and novelist-activist Mahasweta Devi or the Nona-danga activists.
But it is nothing exceptional, as political leaders and parties in the subcontinent and beyond have shown these mixed tendencies during their transition from the ruled to rulers before revealing their true colours. We need not hazard a guess about what Joan of Arc would have morphed into had she risen to power. But history is replete with examples of popular heroes and heroines of resistance against autocracies stepping into the shoes of their former tormentors.
Some of the pro-Mamata Left voices may try to weigh the percentage of positive and negative aspects of the Mamata regime as the post-Stalin Soviet tradition of political evaluation goes. Some others may think of articulating their nuanced position on the Mamata rule in Mao's categories of principal and non-principal contradictions, if not in the parameters of antagonistic and non-antagonistic ones. These analytical tools and collateral tactical ploys have already exposed their inherent dangers across the world as they legitimise condoning of the crimes of petty despots in communities and classes, regions and countries while fighting against the bigger ones. Today's struggles against the Congress-led Centre's (or BJP-led) neo-liberal policies need mobilisation and support of all kinds of forces including regional political forces like Mamata, irrespective of whether their opposition is informed by populist instincts, electoral calculations or genuine pro-people convictions.
Mamata's move to form a party core group to keep a tab on the proposed Central legislation and articulation of the party's position indicates her plan to intensify the clash and bargain with the Congress after the Prez poll.
But that should not necessarily stop the pro-Paribartan Left from raising their voice against the undemocratic mindset and activities of Mamata and her ilk. Any show of concern for radical economic democracy at the national level will be hypocritical without raising their voice against the neo-liberal practices and attacks on political democracy by the regional satraps even if they are mavericks.
If this understanding smacks of ‘overreaction to local issues' or lacks ‘tactfulness', it is better than repeating the history of self-elusive tactics of the two big Communist Parties vis-à-vis the Congress and ending as the weathercocks. It is better to take up the Sisyphusian task of moving the twin rocks of yearning for economic and political democracy uphill while being painfully aware that every regime will roll them down one way or the other.
The author is a Kolkata-based journalist.