Mamata Banerjee bucks the trend of India’s women political leaders whose rise can be traced to their familial or dynastic connections or the blessings of a male godfather. How and why did this happen? Was she able to do it because her battleground was West Bengal and not caste-ridden Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, tribal Jharkhand or for that matter any other state? Unlike most other Indian states, West Bengal perhaps provides the most secular and gender-neutral playing field for a leader without dynastic credentials to create a niche for herself/himself, even though the iron grip of an ideological wave poses political problems of a different kind. Indeed, where Banerjee is concerned, it is ironic that a person without the branding of a dynasty has been battling one of a different sort: the might of a political dynasty created by the Left Front through its rule of over three decades.

In such a scenario, unlike leaders who stand on a familial/dynastic legacy, Banerjee was forced to create her own space and, in doing so, to constantly evolve and reinvent herself as she picked her way through the maelstrom since her entry into politics as a young student leader in ribboned plaits in 1970 and reached a position from where she began posing the first serious threat to the Left Front government since it came to power in 1977.

The career graph of the 56-year old leader can be broadly categorized into three phases. The first phase was her entry into student politics and the Chhatra Parishad (student wing of the Congress party) where she started off as a street fighter, graduated into the Congress party and then groomed herself as a rebel within the party while earning her masters degree in education and law. During this period, her seniors like Siddharth Shankar Ray spotted and nurtured her fiery and never-say-die spirit that also fetched her headlines, as the time in April 1975 when she reportedly clambered onto the bonnet of Jayaprakash Narayan’s car when he came to Calcutta (as it was then called) for a meeting to protest Indira Gandhi’s policies.

Banerjee remained a party loyalist during the Emergency and made her big ticket entry to the national scene by defeating Marxist veteran Somnath Chatterjee for the Jadavpur parliamentary seat in 1984. Her legislative career suffered a setback when she lost in 1989 in an anti-Congress wave. She came back to Parliament in 1991 and was made a junior minister where she learned the ropes of administration and legislative functioning. Over the years, she won five more Lok Sabha elections, was a Cabinet minister and held several portfolios including the railways, boosting her rebel image by resigning her ministership more than once.

 

The second phase began when she set up the Trinamool Congress in 1997, gaining the experience of forming a party and trying to create space for it through street-level agitations. And although her party struggled to make its presence felt, the era of coalitions gave her a national role when she first became a part of the BJP-led NDA government and then of the Congress-led UPA in 2009. That gave both her image and her anti-Left politics a big boost as she used the railways portfolio to cultivate the electorate in West Bengal. Derided, ridiculed and often dismissed as mercurial, Banerjee did not let the ‘humiliation’ belittle her. ‘Human beings can go through anything in life. What they cannot take is humiliation. In her case, she was humiliated by the CPM, the media and the elite – that has brought out the fire in her,’ said a local leader from West Bengal who has closely monitored her political growth.

Banerjee tided the crisis of confidence when her party won only one Lok Sabha seat in 2004, lost control of the Kolkata municipal corporation in 2005 and plunged to just 30 seats in the assembly in 2006 (though there was a difference of only six per cent between the combined vote share of the Trinamool and the Congress, which had contested separately, and the CPM-led combine), as the Left captured 235 of the 294 seats.

But her career graph began to rise soon thereafter as the Left launched its aggressive industrialization policy. Banerjee went on the warpath, opposing the acquisition of farmland at Howrah, Nandigram and Singur. Along the way she won the support of many intellectuals and activists. The 2009 Lok Sabha polls fetched her 19 seats and a hike of 10.2% in vote share. This was probably the first time that the Left’s vote share dropped way below the 50% mark to touch 43.3%. In the 2010 civic polls, Banerjee dealt a crushing blow to the Left, capturing not only the prestigious Kolkata municipal corporation but 36 other municipalities also. And then she began getting ready to test her strength in the assembly polls. Banerjee had clearly fortified herself from her earlier setbacks and was slowly becoming a David out to take on the CPM Goliath.

Her victory in the six-phased assembly elections in West Bengal would not only help her make history by toppling the longest serving elected communist government, one that spanned three decades and two generations of voters, but also facilitate her entry into the third phase of her career where her leadership role will now have to extend to the government and its multiple challenges.

 

This is the phase when she will have to take on a new role, recast her image as a temperamental leader and prove that she is capable of running a government and administering a state. If elected, she will have to prepare for a role reversal where she will be facing a Left offensive against her government. There will be challenges of creating a party structure, building a cadre and defining a vision of governance. Currently, she is trying to create a phalanx of leaders who can help in governance by turning to former bureaucrats, economists and artistes. Working for long on how to dislodge the Left Front from power, Banerjee is now trying to deal with these handicaps.

‘The test of leadership comes when the going is rough and tough. It also comes when the times are good and the leader refrains from turning vengeful for the bad times he or she has gone through,’ said a Trinamool leader who did not want to be named. Which way Banerjee turns, time alone will tell. But her emergence as an alternative leader has come at a juncture when the West Bengal society itself is in a state of flux, the Left’s grip on it is weakening and communist veterans like Jyoti Basu are no longer around to provide an anchor.

 

Left leaders like former chief minister Jyoti Basu were seen as icons by a feudal society that reveres its elite. Basu was a hero of the masses, a towering personality who was admired, considered invincible but not approachable. When he stepped down in 2000 because of old age and failing health, his government was losing popularity, there were allegations of corruption involving his son, the economy was stagnating, unemployment was rising and the administration slowing down. Many wondered whether his replacement, Buddhadev Bhattacharjee, would be able to measure up to Basu’s image and meet the rising challenges, given their contrasting backgrounds and personalities.

But the middle class was able to identify with Bhattacharjee who comes from the upper middle class and represents their thinking and culture. His clean image proved an asset. But as the communist leader tried to liberalize Bengal’s economy to attune it to a globalized world, going on an industrialization drive to transform the state where agriculture is the mainstay and primary source of income for the people, he hit a roadblock.

Since 2006, the state has been in an upheaval. There was agrarian resistance in Nandigram and Singur – providing Banerjee with enough ammunition to make her anti-Left agitation viable and credible. ‘Singur and Nandigram allowed her to locate a political trajectory she was desperately looking for after her party was routed in the 2004 general elections,’ Sumit Chowdhury, a filmmaker and activist was quoted saying in a recent interview. The battle intensified amid armed clashes between the Left and anti-Left forces led respectively by the Marxists and the harmads (armed squads) and the Trinamool and the Maoists.

 

Through all this, what was considered as Banerjee’s handicap during the Basu era and in the early years of Bhattacharjee’s leadership, has turned out to be her USP: her simple and virtually Gandhian lifestyle reflected in her cotton sari, jhola, hawai chappals and the small house she occupies in the backlanes of Kalighat in Kolkata, her Bengalized and broken English, and her error-ridden Hindi and Urdu couplets that she frequently uses in her speeches. Unlike Basu, who represented the elite or Bhattacharjee, a representative of the upper-middle class, Banerjee provided a sense of identity to the middle and lower rungs of the population, connecting with them and dreaming their dreams.

Banerjee is considered earthy and rooted to the ground – a trait best exemplified by the name and symbol of her party, the Trinamool Congress (grassroots as symbolized by flowers and a bed of grass). She is considered by her supporters as ‘one among us.’ Her image as a gutsy fighter with a never say die spirit outweighs her shrill voice and lack of oratory. But her biggest USP is her squeaky clean image of total honesty and absence of taint or corruption. Her weak spots: a mercurial temperament and a failure to give as much attention to developing a vision for the party as to her determined bid to oust the Left from West Bengal.

 

As the perception grew that she could pose a challenge to the Left Front government, Banerjee was increasingly described as a phenomenon and faced intense scrutiny by the people, political adversaries and allies and the academia. There is now a heated debate whether Banerjee spells a new kind of politics, reflects the rise of the subaltern class and provides a new direction and alternative to the state or whether she will maintain the status quo, failing to mark any substantial departure from the past. Indeed, there are even questions whether Didi, as she is popularly called by her supporters, has resorted to a political branding which is akin to, yet distinct from, the familial dynasties of, say, the Nehru-Gandhis (Congress), Abdullahs (National Conference), Chautalas and Hoodas (Haryana), the Karunanidhis (Tamil Nadu) or their ilk elsewhere in the country.

Indeed, this political branding makes the Trinamool Congress synonymous with Banerjee’s persona much in the way as the Congress is identified with the Gandhis, the National Conference with the Abdullahs, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagham with Karunanidhi, the Rashtriya Janata Dal with Lalu Prasad Yadav, the Samajwadi Party with Mulayam Singh Yadav or the Bahujan Samaj Party and All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagham with Mayawati and J. Jayalalithaa respectively. In most cases, all powers, be it of the organization or government as the case may be, are concentrated in the hands of a supreme leader of the party concerned.

Take the case of the Congress, where Prime Minister Manmohan Singh runs the Congress-led coalition government and Sonia Gandhi the organization, but the party’s time-honoured norm of vesting the two posts in the same person (a Nehru or a Gandhi), also plays an important and determining role in defining its policies.

Falling in a different category are the Left and the Bharatiya Janata Party. Though they too had their share of towering personalities in Jyoti Basu or A.B. Vajpayee for instance, they are unlike the other parties in ensuring that there is no synonymity between the organization/government and the leader.

 

In the case of the Trinamool, Banerjee has been and remains its face and voice. The party has a constitution that spells out its structure and functioning. But, in a reflection of the fact that Banerjee’s entire energy has been focused on battling the Left and working towards its removal rather than in setting up a proper organizational structure, the Trinamool Congress’s website does not even provide a list of office-bearers who manage the party. This failure tends to reinforce the fact and impression that the Trinamool remains a one-woman party in which only Banerjee’s word counts and only her actions matter. Even the long list of intellectuals who joined the ranks of the Trinamool after getting disillusioned by the Communists, have got subsumed under her personality.

While the objective of the party as spelt out in its constitution is to uphold and work for the furtherance of the principles of nationalism, socialism, secularism and democracy, many wonder whether her working style would pass the test of democratic functioning. Inevitably, there are questions whether she will work towards these goals if and when she gets to form the government in the state or centralize all powers in herself.

 

Recently, Banerjee displayed another contradiction. For a leader who made her mark without a family name and scrupulously kept her family of brothers and sisters away from politics, Banerjee has failed to follow the same benchmark in her own party. Of the 224 Trinamool candidates fielded for the April-May 2011 assembly polls, at least a dozen are relatives of party functionaries, including Union ministers and MPs. In allotting tickets to the kith and kin of her leaders, Banerjee has in the process also sown the first seeds of local dynasties.

The list of relatives in the candidates’ list includes Subhranshu Roy, son of Union Minister of State Mukul Roy, Iqbal Ahmed, younger brother of junior Union Minister Sultan Ahmed, Sudarshan Ghosh Dastidar, husband of Barasat MP Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar, Kasturi Das, mother-in-law of Kolkata mayor Sovan Chatterjee. Relatives of Trinamool workers who were killed in clashes with the CPM have also been accommodated.

Why did Banerjee bring this trend into the Trinamool? Was it because she began her political career with the Congress which is prone to giving tickets to the kith and kin of leaders and thus had subconsciously imbibed this in her functioning? Or was it because of an apprehension that while she was able to rally people, she still had to create a cadre which can contest an election or shepherd the voters to the polling booths? Or was it because of a feeling that the Trinamool had a better chance of winning a seat if she handed it to a relative of the local MP or leader, specially when the victory or loss of any seat could make or mar her goal of defeating the Left Front? The answer perhaps lies in a combination of all these factors.

But if Banerjee went against her image to dole out tickets to relatives, she can take comfort from the fact that the communist parties too have jettisoned their age-old ideological opposition to the encouragement or perpetuation of political dynasties. The list of around ten such candidates of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) includes Faud Halim, son of assembly Speaker Hashim Abdul Halim, Udayan Guha, son of former state minister and late Kamal Guha, Ranu Roychowdhury, wife of a prominent party leader Goutam Roychowdhury.

 

Unlike the Trinamool and the CPM, there was no surprise that the Congress pitched for relatives in ticket distribution. The party has always accommodated blood groups at the national and state levels. Both Congress President Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul Gandhi are in the Lok Sabha. So are the uncle and niece A.H.A. Khan Chowdhury and Mausam Noor. The father and son duo of Murli and Milind Deora are Members of Parliament. Then, there’s the father-in-law, son-in-law team of Farooq Abdullah and Sachin Pilot. There are several other MPs whose close relatives are prominent leaders in states. Bengal for the Congress is no different. Prominent in the party’s list of 65 candidates for the upcoming assembly polls in the state is Abhijit Mukherjee, son of Union Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee. Others falling in the same category include Shamik Hussain, son of Congress MP Mannan Hussain and Isha Khan Chowdhury, son of A.H.A. Khan Chowdhury.

Clearly, the trend of giving primacy to political families in elections cuts across ideologies, parties, states and regions – both vertically and horizontally. For example, there’s the mother-son combine of Bharatiya Janata Party MPs Maneka and Varun Gandhi, the father-daughter duo of Nationalist Congress Party chief Sharad Pawar and Supriya Sule and the father-son pair of Janata Dal (Secular) leader H.D. Deve Gowda and his son H.D. Kumaraswamy. Delhi’s Chief Minister and Congress leader Sheila Dikshit’s son Sandeep and Himachal Chief Minister P.K. Dhumal’s son Anurag Thakur represent the Congress and the BJP respectively in the Lok Sabha. In his book India: A Portrait, Patrick French noted that 28.6% of MPs in the current Lok Sabha belong to political dynasties and more than 66% of younger MPs hail from political families. And as he delved deeper, the big question that haunted him was whether Indian national politics was becoming hereditary even as the elections themselves have become more vibrant and open.

 

But to get back to the other question: Is Banerjee’s a case of the rise of a subaltern leader? The debate between Sumanta Bannerjee through his open letter to Mahasweta Devi, D. Bandhopadhyay, Suvaprasanna and others and the response to it by Dipayan Rai Chaudhuri in August-September 2010, reflects the divided opinion on the issue. Though her origins were humble, but not from the labouring class, Mamata Banerjee did give voice to the rural poor and the urban middle classes who were upset with the corruption under Left Front rule, agitated over land acquisitions and angry over the escalating violence involving the CPM, the Maoists and the harmads (hired mercenaries) despite charges of a Trinamool-Maoist nexus. Whether she would provide an alternative model of politics and governance has been left to be tested for another day: the single point agenda of the anti-Left forces is to remove the communists from power – and in case of a victory, from the power structures.

 

Poribarton, poribarton, poribarton. Change, change and change. This was Banerjee’s refrain even before the announcement of the assembly elections by the Election Commission of India and it has gathered steam during the election campaign, her repeated exhortations for ‘poribarton’ finding resonance with the people across two voting generations who have seen nothing other than a Left government in West Bengal. Ironically, it was this very call for change that hoisted the CPM to victory in 1977. Thirty four years down the line, a similar demand from Banerjee has rocked their boat, with questions being raised even about their political and ideological relevance. In 1977, the war cry saw the people voting out the Congress; this time, the Congress is riding piggyback on the Trinamool, which is now the dominant partner in the joint anti-Left offensive. The emotive and inclusive content comes from Banerjee’s slogan of ‘Ma, Mati, Manush’ (mother, land and people).

What has given strength to Banerjee’s slogan is the rainbow coalition that backed her in her struggle, including in the pro-farmer agitations at Singur, where the Tatas were planning to set up a car manufacturing factory and at Nandigram, where the Salim group wanted to establish a chemical hub under the special economic zone policy and in her battle against the Left over the Netai carnage. They included writers, singers, actors, economists, civil servants and a host of other prominent personalities like Mahasweta Devi, Suvaprasanna, Bratya Basu and Debabrata Bandhopadhyaya.

Intellectuals, who once supported the Left, put up posters in Kolkata giving vent to their angst and hope. ‘Poribarton Chai’ (we want change) proclaimed a large hoarding put up by the city’s intellectual class. Many of them moved out of their studios, boardrooms and campuses to contest the elections on the Trinamool ticket. There’s Amit Mitra, former secretary general of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), national award winning actress Debashree Roy, Bengali actor Chiranjeet, theatre personality Bratya Basu, singers Anup Ghosal and Parikhit Bala and former chief secretary Manish Gupta (who Banerjee chose to contest against Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, chief minister). The end result: an eclectic mix.

 

This may prove to be a boon as well as a bane for Banerjee and her Trinamool Congress. Rooted in its anti-Left agitation, the Trinamool lacks the solidity of an organization that gains its internal strength from a layered organizational base, periodic membership drives, regular organizational polls, party elections, proper accounting of money and consultative mechanisms within the party. If the dependence on a family hampers the normal democratic functioning of a party, so does the dependence on a single leader.

Presently, the Trinamool derives its strength from the support it has got from the people and opinion-makers on the issues it has identified itself with in its struggle of ousting the CPM-led Left Front. But the philosophy of the Trinamool remains untested. It would come under the scanner if the party wins and is called upon to administer the state which has a financial debt of over two lakh crore rupees and the highest gross state domestic product to debt ratio among the states, where the unemployment rate is 4.93 per cent a year, and where the gradual destruction of the organized manufacturing sector and growth of the unorganized sector has left the state with a low tax base and its adverse impact on allocations for the social sector.

 

Focused until now on removing the Left, the Trinamool has yet to flesh out its vision for West Bengal, which so far has been spelt out in only general terms. It is here perhaps that Banerjee’s strategy of giving primacy to her rainbow coalition of opinion-makers fits in. If she wins, she will rely on, if not outsource, governance to the experts in her team. Her choice of Amit Mitra as a candidate against CPM’s veteran finance minister Asim Dasgupta would help her serve two interests: she gets an expert on economic, corporate and business issues who could steer the finances and economic policies of the state. At the same time, it would help turn her anti-industry profile after forcing the Tatas and their Nano car project out of the state into a business- and industry-friendly image. Mitra now vows to bring industry and business back to West Bengal.

Post-election, the Trinamool Congress’s trouble spots would lie in its relationship with the alliance partner, the Congress, as well as with the Left parties. The main areas of conflict with the Congress leadership at the Centre would revolve around the railway portfolio Banerjee holds. Though the Congress reluctantly came to terms with her absenteeism as railway minister when she spent more time in West Bengal than in Delhi, the big question now is about the fate of this ministry in the post-election period and who it goes to. Will she continue to lay claim to the portfolio and demand it for one of her nominees? What are the terms and conditions she will set, specially if the Trinamool and the Congress get to form a coalition in the state?

The second would be her stance on policy issues. Her objection to the land acquisition act had prompted the Centre to put it on hold. It will be interesting to see how she deals with such issues at the national level and whether she would be more accommodating or rigid.

The Maoist problem is another irritant, as in her battle against the Left, the Trinamool chief is often accused of having colluded with the ultras. The post-election scenario will be examined for its violence and for the role the Naxalites play and the pressures they exert on the Trinamool. And if the Left loses the election, Banerjee will have to gear herself to face a belligerent party which will be out to unsettle her.

 

The Trinamool and Congress relations at the state level are likely to deteriorate in the face of fears that a resounding victory by Banerjee would reduce the alliance partner to a non-entity as had happened when the Congress tied up with the BSP for the 1996 assembly polls in Uttar Pradesh and the RJD in Bihar. The signs of heartburning are there, with local Congress leaders upset that their party was given only 65 of the 294 assembly seats to contest in the state – and that too after Banerjee issued an ultimatum that smacked of a ‘take it or leave it’ approach. The Trinamool Congress retained the rest, allocating two seats to SUCI and one to the NCP. Besides dashing the hopes of Congressmen of rebuilding their base in West Bengal, the low number of seats the party has got to contest in West Bengal also compromises its dream of coming to power on its own in the Lok Sabha elections in 2014.

Likewise, Banerjee’s faceoff with the Left will continue even after the elections as she faces perhaps her toughest challenge as a political game changer in the state. The first would be political violence and the Maoist problem where reports suggest that having ridden the tiger of Maoism she would find it difficult to get off it. Perhaps conscious of the dangers that lie ahead, Banerjee has already started saying, ‘We are not for the politics of bandh and bullets. We stand for development and peace.’ ‘Badla noye, badol chai’ (We want change, not revenge).

 

Her next challenge would be to defang the Left and reform the institutions which have been captured by the CPM and its affiliates. Even if the change of regime brings about a shift in loyalties, there will always be a group of CPM supporters who can compromise the changes to be effected. Banerjee herself is likely to come under pressure from her own rank and file to capture these on behalf of the Trinamool.

Banerjee’s real test will be on the economic front. Having exhausted the growth potential of agriculture, the CPM turned to tap private industrial capital but tripped on the farmers agitation launched by Banerjee against the forcible acquisition of land in Nandigram and Singur. Conscious that she may have to follow Bhattacharjee’s path, Banerjee began correcting the impression that she is anti-industry once the Tatas shifted their Nano plant from Singur to Gujarat.

‘We are not against industry or industrialization. It is bad propaganda against us,’ she said as far back as in October 2008 and repeated it several times since then, with varying emphasis. ‘I am not against industrialization. But I want industry to coexist with agriculture. I am against industry that kills farming.’

 

* The article was written before the West Bengal elections of April-May 2011.