Theatrics of a Bengal tigress

And never failing to make her rebellion a spectacle eminently worthy of newspaper headlines. More often than not, her methods of revolt will be quite unconventional. So much so that one keeps wondering which is her message and which the medium. But her people lap it all up because in her they seethe girl next door relentlessly fighting the venerable Jyoti Basu.

They adore her but also fear her unpredictable turns in mood. Even her closest lieutenants sometimes find it difficult to gauge her humours. Some, like Pankaj Banerjee, one-time acolyte of Congress leader Saugata Ray, who was her party’s first chairman, simply could not live up to the task and had to leave her company.

Little wonder the BJP has discovered in her a very strange bedfellow. Saffron supporters in West Bengal had always known it. State BJP president Tapan Sikdar had actually faced her verbal fury right from the time the party entered into an uneasy alliance with her Trinamool Congress before the last general election. It is now the turn of Vajpayee and Advani to learn to live with their volatile ally from Bengal. In fact, the Vajpayee Government seems perpetually caught between Jayalalitha’s jabs and Mamata’s miffs. But when the lady of Chennai kept threatening to withdraw support to the Government on one issue or another, theBengal “tigress” roared in protest against Jayalalitha’s “blackmail” and rose in the Government’s defence.

All the same, in less than five months, she has threatened twice to withdraw support to Vajpayee’s Government. In July, she sprang a unique surprise by “temporarily suspending” her party’s support to the Government. People understood it as her protest against some action or lack of action on the part of the Centre, but the method remained baffling. This time, as she pulled out of the coordination committee of the BJP and its allies over the issue of rising prices, she was again making a point but not quite explaining it. Messrs Vajpayee and Advani must be familiar with this by now.

The will-she, won’t-she puzzle has become the key to understanding Mamata Banerjee.

The puzzle alternately intrigued and angered the post-Rajiv Gandhi Congress leadership. Rajiv Gandhi’s death marked the beginning of the end of her relationship with the Congress. Her first revolt against the Congress leadershipcame when she lost the West Bengal Congress president’s election to Somen Mitra in 1992. Out she went to plough a lonely furrow, accusing the local Congress leaders of a secret understanding with her bete noire, the CPI(M). Most PCC leaders, she declared in her typical, homely idiom, were like tarmooj (water melon), whose shell is the Congress (green), but whose core is Marxist (red).

She took her rebellion to fever pitch when she announced her resignation from the Narasimha Rao cabinet at a Youth Congress rally at Calcutta’s Brigade Parade Ground. Unusual, one would think, for a Union Cabinet minister to announce her resignation that way. But that precisely is Mamata Banerjee. It was also fittingly symbolic because the maidan, and not the corridors of power, has always been her natural terrain.

The maidan is where she has always taken on the might of the CPI(M). Her modest, tile-roofed home in an obscure lane in south Calcutta’s downmarket Kalighat is seen as an extension of the maidan. Simple, artless,if also unorthodox, Mamata began her many fights from that slum-like neighbourhood.

Unlike most other politicians who graduate to more fancied locales once they make it big, she still lives there and lives in much the same fashion as she has always done. In fact, her simple moorings shot her to overnight fame when she trounced heavyweight CPI(M) leader Somnath Chatterjee in the 1984 general elections from the Jadavpur constituency. It could have been the sympathy wave in the wake of Indira Gandhi’s assassination, but Mamata the Giant-killer was born at that moment.

She could have slipped into inconsequence after the defeat in the 1989 elections. But the Marxists, increasingly jittery about her growing popularity with Congress supporters, came to her rescue. In August 1990, Marxist goons launched a murderous attack on her at a place not far from her south Calcutta home. Critically injured, Mamata the fighter was reborn as Mamata the possible martyr for the anti-Marxist cause.

After that there was nolooking back. She fought the Congress from within, as she fought the CPI(M). With the Congress and the CPI(M) patching up differences for the sake of national politics, she found her party an inadequate battle camp. She had to set up her own camp and fly her own pennant. The Trinamool Congress was born. In the BJP she found the true enemy of the Reds. Hence the alliance before the February elections to the Lok Sabha. The results proved her instincts right.

But the Lok Sabha poll results also threw up another Mamata Banerjee. It was no longer just the simple girl next door. She now was wooed by the Prime Minister. She still lived in her nondescript home but now the high and mighty from Delhi came visiting her there. With one thing or another, she ensured they did. Even for the local media, that did so much to make her what she is, she was becoming a rather unknown quantity, saying one thing today and a completely different thing tomorrow.

The trust of even the most credulous was strained when she claimedto have been “bitten” by a senior police officer during an agitation last month. Or when her henchmen ran amok spreading a rumour that she had been “shot” by the police during the skirmish. This perhaps because the more she changed, the more she remained the same.