Mamata Banerjee: My Unforgettable Memories

Prologue

If you count the days it works out to less than a month-and-a-half. But those were red letter days in West Bengal’s political calendar, heralding the end of a historic movement that has earned its players a place in the history books.

10 April 2011. Mamata Banerjee flew out from Kolkata’s Race Course helipad towards Habibpur in Malda, officially kicking off her election campaign. That was the beginning. The end came on 20 May, the day she took oath as the chief minister of West Bengal in Raj Bhavan and was virtually carried by a tidal wave of supporters all the way to the State Legislative Assembly.

Elections, victory, and defeat are all a natural part of the democratic process. But under the Left Front regime, West Bengal had come to forget this natural process. While governments changed regularly in other states across the country, West Bengal remained an unfortunate exception. Till now. After thirty-four years, the Left-Front’s supremacy in the state came crashing down. And the person who has made it possible is Mamata Banerjee.

Mamata Banerjee was catapulted to the national limelight when she debuted in parliamentary politics by defeating CPM strongman Somenath Chatterjee in the Jadavpur constituency. That was 1984. Jadavpur was considered a red bastion. The young Banerjee immediately attracted attention for her integrity, simple lifestyle, and the fire in her belly to fight the excesses of the ruling regime. Her spirited presence in the Lok Sabha, uncompromising protests against the CPM’s misdeeds, and above all relentless lobbying in the interest of her state was praiseworthy. In that respect, she was a sterling exception in the state Congress leadership of the day. These qualities also earned her the respect of the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. Not surprisingly she quickly became the CPM’s enemy number one. The ruling regime realized, early on, that unless they clipped her wings, she would soon become a real political danger to them in West Bengal.

So they tried their best to cow her down. Again and again. In 1990, she was brutally attacked near Hazra crossing as the CPM armada rained blows on her head. She fought death and returned from the hospital but the injury continues to bother her to this day. But that attack also made something else crystal clear – that the red brigade’s real enemy is the fiery girl from the narrow bylanes of Kalighat. When Mamata was discharged from the hospital, Rajiv Gandhi, the then Congress president, immediately made her the head of the West Bengal Youth Congress, giving her fight a stamp of approval.

Thus began the next chapter in Mamata Banerjee’s political career as she started a two-pronged fight taking on not just the CPM but also those Congressmen who, at heart, were ‘soft’ on the Left. It is doubtful whether any other politician in India has had to wage a simultaneous battle against both the enemy on the outside as well as their sympathizers on the inside for so long and with such undiminished aggression.

1991 Lok Sabha elections: Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated at the fag end of his campaign. But the Congress returned to power after the polls. The new prime minister, PV Narasimha Rao selected Mamata to head the Ministry of Sports and Youth Affairs. Alongside her duties as a member of the Central Government, Mamata continued to focus attention on organizing the anti-CPM movement in West Bengal. In 1992, she stood for and lost the elections to head the Pradesh Congress – a victim of intra-party conspiracy. Yet she refused to give up her anti-CPM agitations, refused to compromise on what she felt was right. That November she organized a massive meeting at the Brigade Parade Grounds in the name of the Youth Congress. The meeting was an unprecedented success. A tidal wave of supporters thronged the ground. Sensing the popular mood, even those within the party who were known to be opposed to her, felt compelled to take the stage. Mamata used that overwhelming public response and the platform it provided to literally sound the death knell for the Left Front. She announced her resignation as a central minister to return to the state.

For the next two decades, Mamata waged a fight to the finish to make that prophecy of the death-knell come true. Those years of struggle also earned her both public respect and recognition. People saw in her sometimes the fire of protest, sometimes the gentle touch of affection. They saw her sometimes standing up for and beside the dispossessed and the needy, sometimes as a relentless and implacable adversary of tyranny, full of stubborn spirit, never giving up, never losing hope.  

One of most significant event of this phase of her life was the way she was evicted from Writers’ Building, dragged by her hair. That was 7 January 1993. Mamata was a Union government minister then. That day she had taken a poor deaf and dumb girl from Nadia, who had been brutally raped, to Chief Minister Jyoti Basu seeking justice. Not only did Jyoti Basu not meet her and her contingent, police officials stationed at Writers’ Building were asked to evict the lot. What happened afterwards is perhaps one of the blackest and most shameful episodes in the state’s democratic history. The way Mamata Banerjee was dragged out of the Writers’ Building, taken to Lal Bazar police headquarters, refused bail and later, forcibly evicted in the dead of the night with some help from a lathi-wielding force make up for a sordid and ugly story. And that was not the end of the matter. The press, which reported the manner in which a Central Government minister was manhandled inside Writers’ Building, also had to pay a price for being outspoken. The press corner in Writers’ Building was summarily demolished so that entry and access to the chief minister’s office would become difficult, nay impossible, for journalists. That press corner has still not returned to the Writers’ but perhaps the current scenario is completely different. 

Among all the mayhem that followed her visit to the Writers’, Mamata made an announcement. ‘If I ever enter Mahakaran [the Bengali name for Writers’ Building] again I shall do so with my head held high.’ It is perhaps providential that that is exactly how things finally turned out. Mamata Banerjee was still a Union government minister in January 1993. For the next eighteen years, she never stepped inside ‘Mahakaran’ keeping her promise until she returned to those haloed precincts triumphant on 20 May 2011 as the new chief minister! 

While in Congress, Mamata’s struggles against her own party men came to a head on 9 August 1997, another milestone in her amazing career. An AICC convention was on at Netaji Indoor Stadium in Calcutta. Everyone from the then Congress Parliamentary Party president Sitaram Kesri, Sonia Gandhi to the then Pradesh Congress chief Somen Mitra were present. Along with grassroots (Trinamool) Congress workers, Mamata announced an ‘outdoor’ convention. It turned into an immense gathering at the foot of the statue of Mahatma Gandhi. At that forum, Mamata formed the West Bengal Pradesh Trinamool Congress workers’ committee. That is how ‘trinamool’ first emerged in Mamata Banerjee’s political career. 

After this the political backdrop changed rapidly. Mamata quit Congress to form Trinamool Congress in 1998. Their first meeting at Kolkata’s busy Shyam Bazar crossing attracted a tidal wave of supporters. In the 1999 Lok Sabha elections, Trinamool emerged as the main Opposition party in the state, leaving the Congress far behind. Since then the party and the leader have been on a relentless march ahead, politically. Mamata Banerjee became the sole refuge for all those who wanted to protest against or were brutalized by the CPM’s tyranny and misrule. She never needed to look back, ever again.

The ruling regime’s forcible acquisition of land from unwilling farmers in Singur to build a car factory for the Tatas and the planned mass murder in Nandigram using the police as a façade to wrest control over the area all helped build Mamata’s case. Her 26-day fast protesting against the forcible acquisition of land in Singur not only created history but also attracted the right-thinking civil society to her side. A majority of intellectuals unanimously supported her stand on the issue. The then CM Buddhadev Bhattacharya’s ‘us and them’ politics aimed at explaining and condoning the violence in Nandigram further strengthened Mamata’s popular foundation. There was literally no stopping her.

The 2008 Panchayat elections, 2009 Lok Sabha elections, and 2010 municipal elections all carried enough indications that the Mamata wave would sweep West Bengal in the next Vidhan Sabha elections. That is exactly how things worked out. The state assembly elections in 2011 created history. Trinamool had the Congress as their electoral ally. The people of West Bengal voted unequivocally in favour of Mamata and  her ‘Ma, Mati, Manush’ (Mother, Land, People) philosophy, wiping the Left Front off the face of the state.  

Earlier, when Mamata was appointed the railway minister for the second time in 2009 (the first was in the NDA government led by Atal Behari Vajpayee), she started a huge developmental programme across the country through her ministry. Under her leadership, the Indian Railways started programmes criss-crossing the country, from the north to south, from the east to west. New trains, new lines, development projects under the railways, a Vision 2020 roadmap – her stint in the railway ministry showed just how much the right political will and direction can achieve. In a way examples like this had vanished from the collective memory for a very long time. West Bengal’s electorate desperately seeking development had no doubt that Ms Banerjee would bring that same tenacity and political will to bear upon running the state if her party came to power. So they held on to the hope that she stood for. That was the backdrop of the 2011 Vidhan Sabha elections. 

For an entire month, Mamata toured the length and breadth of Bengal. Every meeting, every procession organized by Trinamool Congress attracted huge crowds across the state. So in a way the results were a foregone conclusion. The Left Front’s 34-year-old stronghold collapsed like a pack of cards. After years of blood, sweat, and tears finally there was light at the end of the tunnel.

Mamata Banerjee is now chief minister. But not an ivory tower one, she is still the leader of the unheard, unseen masses, the dust-covered and sweat-and-tear stained Ma, Mati, Manush. They are the focus of her work, the catalyst behind her political journey. That is why even now, it is easy to reach out to her and she has not divorced herself from her raison d’être. Her Common-man touch is still very much a part of who she is, only now it is a touch that promises assurance and trust to the people showing them just what ‘paribartan’ (change, her winning slogan) is all about.

‘After Baba’s death, one evening I was in the kitchen cooking. Suddenly I saw a pair of feet near the toilet... I picked up the lamp to check... but there was no one in the doorway. Later when I thought about it I realized those feet belonged to my father, I recognized them because I used to massage them every day when he was ill.’

It was dusk and I had been staring at the twilight sky for a while. It looked as if the setting sun was showing me the way. Akbar’s daughter Rose was sitting next to me in the car. She asked me, ‘Is the sun travelling with us too?’ To make the child happy, I replied, ‘Yes… see how the sun is keeping our car company.’ The child believed what I said and asked after a while, ‘But where did the sun go?’ By then, the sun had set beyond the horizon so I told her, ‘It’s nightfall and the sun has gone to sleep in the lap of its mother, the sky.’ Akbar came with us part of the way and then left with his little girl. Leaving me to think about that strange celestial rhythm which makes the sun, the moon, the stars, the planets, night and day, the sights and sounds and smells of the world around us, its beauty and wonder, follow a predetermined pattern. The only thing that does not conform to that routine of sameness is the mind. The mind follows its own pace which is faster than time itself. It leaves no trace on the outside but builds its own little nest in the heart. I call it the temple of the mind. And like all temples, it has a ritual of devotion built from simple, everyday acts of life. Like a computer it stores data. The temple of the mind also logs the comings and goings of day-to-day living. Like the phoenix, who knows it would one day be destroyed, life knows it is finite. Maybe, that is why the mind wanders far, far away.

My life has neither light nor shine/Words are all I can call just mine… A lot has been written about the tumult and polarities of my political life. But what I write here is an attempt to look at myself in a different light, to come face to face with another me, to rediscover my other self.

I came to Calcutta when I was very small. My parents brought me to the house where we still live. It took me some time to realize that I actually had two birthdays. Although my mother would celebrate my birthday every Ashtami (the eighth day of Durga Puja) with her special rice pudding and loads of blessings, my school certificate reads 5 January as my birthday. So one day I asked her, ‘Why do I have two different birthdays?’ She explained that I was not even fifteen when I wrote my school final examinations and would have been disqualified for being underage. So, my father gave a fictitious age and birthday to get around the problem. The result: a new birthday and five years added to my real age.

I never got around to asking my father the reason why he chose 5 January as my birthday. By the time I was old enough to ask questions, he was beyond answering any of them. He died when he was only forty-two. My mother, on the other hand, is at heart a simpleton. I remember I once asking her about my horoscope. When she gave it to me, I saw that my date of birth on it was 5 October. So I asked her, ‘How could you make such a big mistake? Although those close to me know the truth, there are enough people who will believe the school certificate.’ My mother replied, ‘Darling, we are not city-bred people. Neither you nor your elder brother was born in a hospital. Where would I get a birth certificate detailing your birthday and year? When we came to Calcutta, your father admitted you to school… later he handled the formalities for your school leaving examination… so what could I have done?’ I realized it was not my mother’s fault. So in front of her and a couple of my family members, I burnt the horoscope. My logic was that there was no point in keeping a document that had no validity. To the world at large, my school certificate with its erroneous date of birth is the legally-valid document. The confusion over my date of birth is not something unique. Thousands of children born in Indian villages face the same problem. I have seen people work way beyond their retirement age thanks to their fake birth certificates. In my case though it went against me, adding five years to my real age! Ever since I have become a Member of Parliament, I routinely get birthday wishes on 5 January. However, as my real birthday is nowhere close to it, I simply do not feel like accepting the wishes. The confusion over my birthday has always been a bit of an issue with me, privately of course. But who can I blame for the mess? Who is responsible for creating this confusion? Parents should for the sake of their children’s future be careful about documenting their date of birth correctly. No one else should suffer the way I did. Although I hope by disclosing the truth I will not attract fresh criticism. I never celebrate my birthday… it is not part of my DNA. So why am I explaining this? To simply establish the truth. I remember once, my elder brother told me, ‘Mamata, do you know according to your school certificate, you are only six months younger to me.’ I replied, ‘Dada, our father must have thought it’s not important and any old date will do… so how is that our fault?’

According to my mother, it had been raining relentlessly for three days before I was born. However, it stopped raining the moment I was born. That is perhaps why rain plays such an important role in anything significant that I undertake. It has become such a pattern that every time we schedule a programme, we know for sure that it will rain, even if it is just a few drops. Rain-drenched programmes are now part of my life and my colleagues know it and expect nothing less. The rain factor holds true not just for political meetings. I remember when I was Union Railway Minister, the head of the Delhi chapter of Ramakrishna Mission requested me to help set up a bookstall for the society’s publications at the New Delhi railway station. I was happy to oblige Swamiji and on the day of the inauguration, a small programme was organized. Outside, it was bright and sunny but once the programme started, it began to drizzle. Swamiji was really surprised and told me, ‘It seems what I had heard about you is true after all. Any enterprise you undertake is always blessed with rain.’ I remember, the inauguration went off really well