Sometime in the mid-80s, Bengal Congress organised a demonstration against the then mayor of Calcutta, Kamal Basu. As Basu’s car approached the municipal corporation, Congress protestors surrounded the vehicle and one woman, screaming loudly, threw herself on the car.
That woman was Mamata Banerjee. Today, the feisty ‘shrieker’ is Union railway minister, heads her own Trinamul Congress, and is poised – after 33 years on the fringes of the political theatre to take centre-stage, edging the once mighty ‘reds’ out of their West Bengal redoubt. In 2011, as West Bengal is consumed with unprecedented violence, Mamata may realise her biggest ambition yet – to enter Writers’ Building and rule Bengal.
Unlike her former colleagues in the Congress, who earned the sobriquet “watermelons — green from the outside, red inside” — for going soft on the CPI(M), Mamata has been relentless. While her political crutches have changed colour, as she shed her saffron linkages and grew closer to her mother party, Congress, her battle against the Left has been a constant. As a senior Congress leader said: “She remains the only political leader in Bengal whom the Marxists could neither win over nor tame,” unlike most top Congress leaders, “who are with her today, but were once close to CPI(M) bosses.”
Mamata’s call — “Ma, maati, manush (mother, earth, people)” — has struck a chord, and shaken the Left in Bengal. Support for Mamata has always existed. In the 1984 general elections, for instance, she stunned political pundits when she trounced CPI(M) heavyweight Somnath Chaterjee in the Jadavpur Lok Sabha seat. Since then, the Marxist leadership itself has played an unwitting role in her rise and “party general secretary Prakash Karat, who has not been able to evolve from his JNU brand of politics, is responsible for the party’s plight in the state,” a CPI(M) central committee member said.
Ms Banerjee, who had been completely marginalised in state politics and was the sole Trinamul MP in Lok Sabha, bounced back when Karat committed political hara-kiri in three missteps: Snapping ties with the UPA over the Indo-US nuclear deal before the 2009 Parliamentary polls, expelling Somnath Chatterjee, “a widely respected politician in Bengal”; and, attempting and failing to forge a third front. Consequently, the Left parties recorded their worst ever Lok Sabha results in the state, reduced to 16 seats in the 2009 elections from 44 in 2004. Trinamul stepped into the vacant space. Two months later, the Left lost West Bengal’s civic elections to the Congress-Trinamul combine. “Only a miracle can save us now,” says a top CPI(M) leader.
That miracle increasingly seems unlikely to happen, especially as CPI(M) answers poll defeats with infighting and blame-games. At a recent party conference in Vijayawada, Karat attacked Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee for the party’s dipping fortunes, blaming Buddha’s push for industrialization – and Singur - for its growing marginalisation from its agrarian vote bank.
The surge of Maoist activity in West Bengal is yet another nail in the CPI(M) coffin, with even the lumpen elements, which formed the muscle power of the red brigade, switching over to Trinamul.
The Marxists, known for their militant politics, have allegedly begun arming their cadres, setting the stage for what could be the most violent elections in the state as the Left faces defeat and political irrelevance.