Mamata: Beyond 2021

Introduction

THE FIRST TIME I saw Mamata Banerjee was in Jadavpur—a neighbourhood and a Parliamentary constituency in Kolkata—in 1984.

She was the Congress candidate against the CPI(M) leader Somnath Chatterjee, whom she went on to defeat, earning the reputation as a giant-killer. Thirty-eight years have passed since then, a period in which Mamata Banerjee has undertaken a long journey. She has won the Lok Sabha election seven times. She has been a Union minister several times, and is currently on her third successive innings as chief minister of West Bengal. And she has been at the centre of controversy almost throughout.

All relationships have their ups and downs, but mine with her has flowed uninterruptedly. As a journalist I have accompanied her to Rome and the Vatican for Mother Teresa’s canonization, where we marched in a group along the black cobblestones, singing. In Darjeeling, I have been forced to walk with her from Raj Bhavan to Tiger Hill, arriving out of breath and then having a cup of tea together. From her car, I have seen the blue-and-white brightness of Kolkata in the evening, as she pointed out all the beautification initiatives in the city.

On that drive, as we were passing Babughat on the banks of the Hooghly, she spotted some old banners and posters about the Gangasagar fair. A temporary camp had been set up at the spot for pilgrims from Bihar on their way to the fair—Mamata Banerjee had paid them a visit and chatted with them. But now she was upset because it had been a while, and the banners and posters should have been cleared. At once she called Sovan Chatterjee, who was then the Mayor of Kolkata, and said, ‘Kanan [the mayor’s nickname], why haven’t the posters been removed? The Gangasagar fair ended a long time ago. They must be cleared out by tonight.’

This is how Mamata’s do-it-now mentality works, even though her style lacks sophistication. Sometimes she also runs a court rather than a formal office. She is surrounded by administrative officers, political leaders keep dropping in, the phone is always ringing, several rounds of tea are being brought in, and every now and then she jumps to her feet and walks about, for Mamata never remains seated for more than half an hour at a stretch. She has been assaulted several times during protests and has a permanent orthopaedic belt around her waist. It doesn’t stop her from working. She even walks on the treadmill with the belt on.

In short, Mamata is perpetually bursting with vitality and vigour. Her appetite for work is no way diminished even at the age of sixty-seven. She always wants to achieve more, and whenever there is a setback, she is a wounded tigress, taking on an unfamiliar persona—which, too, I have seen.

I was not sure about the results of the 2021 Assembly elections, but Mamata Banerjee had told me, ‘Mark my words, we’ll get more than 200 seats.’ I had felt it was a classic case of the general exuding confidence before the battle so as not to demoralize the troops. While I did not think the BJP would dethrone her, I did feel it would make a serious dent in Mamata’s vote and seat count. But Mamata herself had never been in doubt. And the results proved her right.

Now she has a long journey ahead to 2024, when the next Lok Sabha elections will be held. It’s a journey she’s planning in a slow, calculated manner. Unlike the period before 2019, she now has strategist Prashant Kishor on her side. After the massive victory for Trinamool in the Assembly elections and subsequent by-elections, and Mamata’s own thumping win in Bhawanipur to wipe out the pain of a controversial defeat in Nandigram, she is now looking ahead. In other words, she is working towards taking Trinamool national.

Mamata Banerjee is known for accomplishing what no Congress leader in West Bengal, from Pranab Mukherjee to Priya Ranjan Dasmunsi, from Somen Mitra to Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, could—which was to unseat the CPI(M)-led Left Front after thirty-four years. And now, having become chief minister for the third successive time, there is nothing wrong if Mamata harbours plans for a role in national politics. After all, unlike Narendra Modi, who went from the state of Gujarat to the Centre and was a first-time MP when he became prime minister, Mamata started her politics in Delhi. She was a seven-time MP before she became chief minister.

Still, Mamata also knows that she must balance her national ambition with consolidating Trinamool’s position in the state, so that the BJP, which made significant inroads by increasing its tally of MLAs from three to seventy-seven—although it subsequently lost some of them to resignations and defections—cannot improve its position further. It did win as many as eighteen seats out of forty-two in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, after all.

What are the biggest challenges for Mamata Banerjee on this road from 2021 to 2024? One of them is the idea about her that has been broadcast by the BJP—to the effect that she is partial to Muslims, which will make it difficult for her to be a unanimous choice of the majority at the national level. The BJP, aware of her potential as a national leader, has also pointed out that she has campaigned against outsiders in the state elections, which, by her own logic, makes her an outsider at the national level.

To disprove these theories and establish her acceptance at the all-India level, Mamata will have to make herself popular to the majority not just in West Bengal, as she already has, but also across the country. She must demonstrate, project and establish that she is also a leader of the Hindu community. In using the word ‘outsider’, she had protested against the imposition of an un-Bengali culture on Bengal. She has to explain this clearly, and turn her ‘Joy Bangla’ slogan to ‘Jai Hindustan’ to indicate her objective.

Of course, the new configurations and a restructuring of the UPA will emerge after the 2022 Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh. For now, Mamata’s objective is to present herself as the fulcrum of Opposition unity and a credible alternative as a national leader.

This book covers Mamata Banerjee’s possible journey from 2021 to 2024. I explore her own growth and politics, how she stopped the BJP juggernaut to win the West Bengal Assembly elections in 2021, her relationship with the BJP, the CPI(M) and the Congress, the roles of the Election Commission, the governor and the paramilitary forces, and the politics of religion, language, culture and caste. Mamata is probably the only leader at present who can beat the masters of alternative reality, Amit Shah and Narendra Modi, at their own game, something that the Congress has failed to do since 2014. But the question is, can Mamata replicate this at the national level, as she did in West Bengal in 2021? This book tries to decode her roadmap.

Books often work differently from reality. For the purpose of analysis and understanding, a book breaks down a phenomenon into different themes and treats each of them distinctly. But in reality, all these themes intermingle in the flow of actual politics; they are not watertight compartments. This book, therefore, does not treat them as silos, which is why the elements of the different chapters sometimes overlap.

I have tried to arrive at the truth not through a linear narrative, but through a collage, a mosaic, an interplay of different elements. There is no other suitable way to capture Mamata Banerjee’s energy. The events in this book end in November 2021. Reality may overtake them by the time you’re reading the book, but the directions indicated here are the ones that Mamata Banerjee and the Trinamool Congress are likely to take in their journey to 2024.

1

Meet Mamata Banerjee

LET’S MEET MAMATA Banerjee.

We’re sitting in the nerve centre of the West Bengal administration. Standing on the west bank of the Hooghly, this tall building is named Nabanna. We can see the river through an enormous glass window on the fourteenth floor. There’s a giant TV screen. Mamata Banerjee is seated in her chair. There are two months to go to the 2021 Assembly elections, and the buzz everywhere is that the BJP is coming to power in the state. I am visiting from Delhi to meet Mamata. I tell her: ‘The word in Delhi is that your party will not be re-elected. Whoever I meet there says with one voice, Bengal will now see ashol poriborton (real change). The end of ten years of your rule is at hand.’

Mamata is going through files, her head is bent. She has reading glasses on. She looks up, smiles and then asks someone on the intercom to send two cups of tea. Also some toast and fish fry, she adds.

She gets up and walks to the window. The Second Hooghly Bridge, aka Vidyasagar Setu, is visible. The river flows beneath it. Turning to me, she says: ‘Let me tell you here today, we’re coming back to power. The BJP can shout all it wants from the rooftops; they will be proven wrong. They can’t do it. They have no ground-level understanding.’

I say: ‘You had said the same thing when I interviewed you before the 2019 parliamentary elections. Then too you had claimed the BJP wouldn’t make it. You had said they might get some seats, perhaps improve their tally, but you hadn’t imagined they would get eighteen out of the forty-two seats.’

Now Mamata looks grim. Returning to her chair, she resumes reading her files. After a brief silence, she says: ‘2019 and 2021 are not going to be the same. Look, when a party is in power, someone has to take up the space of the Opposition. I cannot decide who it will be. It’s not my responsibility if the Congress or the CPI(M) cannot occupy it. So, the BJP might. But that does not mean they will come to power. Impossible.’

I wasn’t entirely convinced that day. It had seemed like over-confidence. Narendra Modi and Amit Shah run a vote-gathering machine, they have mastered the art.

When Jawaharlal Nehru was the Prime Minister, he used to be accused of not allowing the Opposition to operate, of not giving them political space, of suppressing them. He too had said that the work of the Opposition must be done by the Opposition, it was not his job to nurture them, it was their problem if they failed.¹ Mamata had spoken to me in the same vein. But was she making a mistake?

When the election results came out, it was obvious that the biggest mistake was made by those who had underestimated her. The Battle of Kurukshetra was fought over eighteen days, while this one lasted three months. Unlike Abhimanyu, who could not escape the chakravyuha—the formation of soldiers that can be entered but cannot be escaped—Mamata Banerjee resisted the attempt to trap her in the same way and emerged almost unscathed, winning over 200 seats for the Trinamool Congress and returning to power.

The question is: How did the BJP lose the plot? And why? They may have gone from three MLAs to seventy-seven (although that number now keeps dropping as some MLAs who joined the BJP from the Trinamool Congress are going back), but for them it was a defeat. For their ambition had been nothing less than unseating Mamata Banerjee. Having created this hype, the defeat seems more magnified. Perhaps Modi and Shah have realized just who Mamata Banerjee is.

Behind the rise of any political leader lies the history of the beginning before the beginning. Who is Mamata Banerjee? The answers to this question will help us make sense of the chemistry behind her success.

Mamata was born in a mud-built labour room, in Rampurhat in Birbhum district, a town where there were neither hospitals nor birth certificates. According to her school certificate, Mamata was born in 1955. When she grew up, her brother told her one day: ‘Do you know, according to our school certificates I am only six months older than you?’ He was, in fact, much older. No one paid attention to precise dates of birth at the time. There was no Aadhaar, after all.

Mamata told me: ‘My mother would say, you were born on Ashtami during Durga Puja, at the time of the Shondhipuja. So, she used to give me a new sari every year on that day, and make paayesh for me. But my birth certificate says January. What can I do about it?’

Because Mamata Banerjee’s father died when she was young, there was no one who could get these things corrected. This makes it clear in what kind of socio-economic situation she began her life. She came of age in a family beset with financial problems.

As she wrote in Realisation, a volume of her autobiography: ‘We didn’t know what hardship was as long as my father was alive. He made plenty of money, and owned land, a house, lorries, everything. The blow came when he was struck down by gastric ulcer at just 41. Being a government contractor, he was owed a great deal of money by the government. He tried very hard to get his dues, so that he could afford the treatment. The fair-weather friends he had helped so much turned away from him at this critical moment. He left us after lying in PG Hospital more or less without treatment. It was fate. My elder brother was 17, and I, 15.’²

After her father’s death Mamata was startled one day to see footprints at the door to the bathroom next to the tiny kitchen. Very familiar. Her father’s feet. It was a dark spot, so she fetched a lantern for a better look. But where were the footprints? They had vanished! But Mamata had seen them and knew them intimately. When her father was ill, she had massaged his feet with oil every evening.

The agony of losing her father kept returning to her. When he died, he left behind two daughters and six sons. With his death, a struggle for existence, something the family had never before experienced, began in earnest. It was a Darwinian battle for survival, with Mamata finding ways to support the family in every respect—which could be one of the reasons she never married. She became the effective head of the family in a society where this role was still reserved for the eldest male member, who, in this case, was her elder brother.

It is said that the Adiganga creek used to flow just behind the house where Mamata lives. This was part of the port area and sailors used to dock their crafts here, laden with goods for trading. For this very reason, a large contingent of sex workers had settled down close to the Kalighat temple, where businessmen often came to pray to the goddess before setting off on trading journeys. This is where Mamata Banerjee grew up. Her battles had begun well before she embarked on her political career and her first act of leadership was within her own family.

After her father’s death, Mamata became the closest person in the family for her mother. Her father owned twelve bighas of land in his ancestral village. Mamata says it was she who persuaded her mother to sell the land and hand over the money to her brother as capital to start his business. Some people had asked her mother what the other children would get if she handed over everything to her eldest son. What if he abandoned the others? It was Mamata’s unilateral decision to give the money to her brother. Keep the faith, she told everyone, he will look after us.

Everyone in Mamata’s family is religious, with grown-ups and children alike visiting the Kalighat temple regularly. She herself believes in religious rituals, in gods and goddesses, in spirits, in the supernatural and in magic. Like millions of women from lower-middle-class families in Bengal, she too fasts and prays on days dedicated to worshipping goddesses like Sitala or Santoshi Ma. She has complete faith in not just the goddess Kali but also in the goddess Bogola. Just like the former President of India, the late Pranab Mukherjee, devoutly chanted mantras to the mother goddess every morning, so does Mamata recite aloud mantras to the goddess Bogola every day before her bath. She used to fast every Friday, not eating anything sour, and have only chickpeas and jaggery in the evening. She had also memorized most of the mantras to the mother goddess.

Is all of this related to Hindutva, then? No. Mamata’s religious practices are much the same as those of women in many middle-class Bengali families. But what is worth noting is that her loyalty lies less to the mainstream deities worshipped by the upper classes and more to the ‘marginal’ goddesses. Despite an upper-caste surname, from a sociocultural perspective she represents the lower levels of society. She personally conducts a Kali Puja at home every year, when 30B Harish Chatterjee Street becomes a meeting point for the extended family.

Among Mamata’s siblings, Sasthi, the eldest brother, married a woman whose family supported the CPI(M). Later, he and his wife moved to another house nearby because of lack of space. Mamata is the second child, followed by Kali, Amit, Ganesh, Kartik and Babun. The other sister, Nanti, is much younger. The wife of one of her brothers committed suicide due to depression, while another brother, Kali, died of Covid-19. Mamata has held the family together through many a storm. Today her siblings are well-established, their business ventures ranging from building materials to paint and car-rentals. Babun, who is enthusiastic about sports, is a high-ranking official of the Indian Olympic Association. Sasthi, always a football-lover, is with the football federation, besides being the patron of a local club. All of Mamata’s brothers are involved in some capacity with the management of various clubs. Many of her nephews and nieces are still in school and college. Mamata is the cementing factor in the differences of opinion and ego clashes within the family. Her brother Amit’s son, Abhishek, is her political heir and his mother, Lata, is Mamata’s constant companion at home.

I have seen Mamata personally cook a delicious khichuri with cashews and raisins at midnight on the festival of Kali Puja after the rituals were completed and feed her sisters-in-law in the kitchen. Religious rituals and personal superstitions occupy a large part of Mamata Banerjee’s life. What kind of puja will be held at home and how, with which priest officiating, are all Mamata’s decisions alone.

The ritual of performing Kali puja at home was established in 1979. Mamata’s brother Kali had been born on the night of Kali Puja. His personality was quite distinct from those of the others. At the local club, Kalighat Milan Sangha, clay pots and idols were sold during Kali Puja every year. Potters from places like Bagnan or Uluberia turned up to make their idols on the club premises and sell them. One year, Kali made some idols of the goddess too, selling all but one of them. Bringing that one unsold idol to his mother, he said: ‘You must start a puja with this.’ She said: ‘How can we, there’s no space at home. You’d better sell it. We’ll extend the house when your brother gets married; we can start the puja next year.’ So, Kali sold the idol for sixteen rupees.

A few months later, when he was visiting his maternal uncles, Kali stood up on his bed one midnight, stark naked, thrusting his tongue out like the images of the goddess and saying, so you sold me for sixteen rupees, the money was more important than worshipping me. The next day Kali left his uncle’s home to build a shack for himself at the edge of the village, smeared ash on his body, and began to live there. He couldn’t recognize his mother when she went to bring him home.³ He was finally brought back with the assurance that there would be a Kali puja at home the following year onwards. Since then, Kali would make a small idol every year, which was kept at home and used during the puja.

I have seen for myself Mamata’s sisters-in-law follow her in observing rituals for the goddess Santoshi. After becoming chief minister, it became impossible for Mamata to continue with these practices—such as not eating anything sour all day, for instance. It was particularly difficult because she often had to tour the districts. So, she gave up her Friday rituals, whereupon her sisters-in-law stopped observing them too.

Mamata’s independent spirit was evident very early on when she was little more than a toddler. One day, her father was taking her elder brother to school and didn’t notice that little Mamata had also slipped out and was following them. No one else noticed, either. When her father came back home, it suddenly occurred to everyone—where’s Mamata? Her father used to call her ‘Monababa’. So where had Monababa vanished? The search began. The Bhowanipore police station was close by. The same police station that she would enter soon after becoming chief minister to free three or four young men who had been accused of setting a police van on fire. It was here that Mamata’s weeping father, accompanied by a few others, went in search of his missing