Mamata on the roll

By blinking first in its confrontation with a recalcitrant ally, the Vajpayee government has signalled that it is more than willing to be a push-over. Trinamool Congressacirc;euro;trade; Didi is already in election mode, and the rest of the nation is left holding the bill for her misguided and expensive populism. Through the staging of some timely sulks and threats, Mamata Banerjee has now succeeded in getting the Centre to partially roll back its September 29 price rise even as, ironically enough, the global price of oil has only risen in the ensuing period. While Mamata will no doubt rush to claim credit for the move with her electorate she should surely, as part of the ruling coalition, also take some responsibility for imposing an additional burden of Rs 500 crore on the state exchequer. But thatacirc;euro;trade;s just the problem. Here is a politician who wants to have her political cake and eat it too.

And, remember, these are early days yet. The assembly election in West Bengal is still a good few months away. With Mamata already painting herself as the saviour of the people at this early stage, things are only going to get more torrid by the time the people of West Bengal actually get to the polling booths. It is against this background that Mamataacirc;euro;trade;s November 14 statements to the West Bengal Quami Tanzeem in Calcutta must be viewed. With nary a thought about Constitutional validity or administrative feasibility, the lady demanded that reservations for Muslims in jobs and educational institutions be made available. While the countryacirc;euro;trade;s founding fathers approved of affirmative action in principle, they had firmly ruled out religion-based reservations after the issue had been debated threadbare in the Constituent Assembly. They had felt at the time that such reservations were inappropriate with the spirit of a secular democracy. Mamata, by making such a demand, is therefore guilty of playing an over-clever,even dangerous, game.

That she has her political compulsions is obvious enough. She and the Left Front government know that if she succeeds in securing the entire Muslim vote for the Trinamool Congress in the state, the Red Flag has a good chance of being pulled down. It is this electoral arithmetic that prompted her to come up with the Mahajot idea some months ago and accounts for her current desperation to counter the negative image she now has with the minority community in the state because of her alliance with the BJP. Consequently, she even argues that the Trinamool became a part of the NDA government at the Centre with the express intention of protecting Muslim interests and that her loyalty extends only to Atal Bihari Vajpayee and not to the BJP. An ingenuous argument certainly, but an extremely time-serving one. While it has succeeded in ruffling the feathers of her ally in the state, going by the noises of protest emanating from the BJP headquarters, there is no guarantee that the Muslim voter in West Bengal will notperceive the blatant cynicism that is manifest in it.