Opinion What Didi does

Even as some film professionals appeal to the public to oppose the BJP, other lesser-known non-state actors are using moving pictures to improve the chances of the ruling party.

When a ship sinks,” remarked Trinamool Congress leader and West Bengal minister Firhad Hakim on Tuesday, “rats start deserting it”. But as the BJP’s West Bengal unit welcomed into its fold three MLAs and 60 councillors — a number of them from the TMC — the party and its supremo seemed to be concerned more with the deserters than the sinking ship. For Mamata Banerjee, a politician of the street and the masses who has thrived in the past by playing David against political Goliaths, the defections coupled with the massive gains the BJP made in the Lok Sabha polls in the state — up to 18 seats from just two — are a turning point. This can be a moment for Banerjee to reinvent the vocabulary, organisation and forms of political mobilisation in the state. Else, it could be the beginning of an unstoppable decline.

Banerjee, more than most, likely understands that a politics that seeks hegemonic control based on a ruthless party organisation and intimidation is one that yields diminishing returns. As a feisty Opposition leader at a time when the CPM seemed unbeatable in Bengal, she received more than her share of arduous challenges. In the end, Banerjee gained as much from the fatigue with a politics of violence and control as from her own persona and political action. But since assuming office, one of the primary criticisms against the chief minister and her party has been that the structures of violence and intimidation that the CPM put in place in its nearly four decades in power have been kept intact, and even extended, by the TMC — the incidents of poll-related violence reported in the state during the just concluded general elections bear testimony to this fact. Now, with the defections, Banerjee faces yet another formidable organisational challenge — to maintain inner-party cohesion.

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With the Narendra Modi-Amit Shah led BJP, Banerjee faces a political machine with a dedicated cadre, ideological clarity and a strong government at the Centre. The politics of identity and religion could become even more salient with the BJP leadership promising, or threatening, to extend the National Register of Citizens to the state. The BJP now controls at least four crucial municipalities in West Bengal, and senior party leaders have asserted that there will be more defections in the near future. After her first term as chief minister, before the state assembly elections in 2016, Banerjee also campaigned on a development plank — by all accounts, schemes like Kanyashree and subsidised rations were delivered to the intended beneficiaries and played a crucial role in her return to office. The TMC now has until 2021 to build on that beginning. How she responds to her setback now will determine the future — her own and of her state. It will also help shape the still incoherent Opposition space at the national level.