Of all the regional Opposition leaders, irrespective of their political party affiliations, the chief minister of Bengal, Mamata Banerjee is the closest to prime minister Narendra Modi. This view of mine might sound shocking and incongruous to those who listen to the regular verbal duels between the two – Mamata accusing Modi of denying financial aid to Bengal, and Modi accusing her of failing to maintain law and order in her state.
But if we examine their respective political backgrounds, and their later performances as rulers, we discern a peculiar pattern of similarities in their rise to power – Modi at the national level and Mamata at her regional level in Bengal. We find that both share common characteristics – (i) beginning as street fighters, indulging in rabble rousing demagogy and provoking violence; (ii) capturing power through intimidation of voters by gangsters employed by their parties; and (iii) once assuming power, retaining it through a combination of populist promises and suppression of protests by those who do not benefit from those promises and political dissenters.
Parallel trajectories of the political careers of Modi and Mamata
Narendra Modi and Mamata Banerjee are separated only by five years – Modi having been born on September 17, 1950, and Mamata on January 5 , 1955. Astrologers and palmists whom both of them approach for blessings on the eve of elections, can go on disputing over the position of the planets that are supposed to preside over their time of birth, and continue to determine their political future. But at the ground level, the common people are divided in their perception and choices – some worshipping, others cursing the two rival leaders.
Let us start with Modi’s rise to power. He began his political career in 1978 as a regional pracharak of the RSS in his home state Gujarat – at around the same time when Mamata was emerging as a political leader in Bengal. He became the general secretary of the BJP’s Gujarat unit in 1987, and through his fiery speeches and aggressive posturing in public meetings, he managed to ensure his party’s victory in the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation elections in 1987. After that, there was no looking back. He steadily increased BJP’s hold on the voters, leading to the winning of 121 seats in the state Assembly after the 1995 elections. He managed to rise up to be the Chief Minister of Gujarat in 2001. The next year, he allowed his henchmen to carry out the genocide of Muslims in his state – infamously known as the 2002 Gujarat riots. This endeared him to his patrons in the Sangh Parivar. When in 2014, as the Parivar’s nominee, he won the Lok Sabha polls and led his party BJP to capture the maximum number of seats in Parliament, as expected, the Sangh Parivar nominated him as the Prime Minister – a post which till now, he has been occupying for three terms.
When turning to Mamata Banerjee, we find that she followed the same path of demagogy and rabble-rousing demonstrative acts that marked Narendra Modi’s rise to power. She started her political career as a student activist of the Congress party in the early 1970s. She shot into media limelight in 1977, when she confronted the Socialist leader Jayaprakash Narayan during his visit to Calcutta, stopped his car and jumped on its bonnet as a display of her party’s objection to Opposition leaders visiting the city, which was then under the rule of her Congress party. This endeared her to her patrons in the Congress party – just as Modi’s similar aggressive and demonstrative actions helped him to rise up in the BJP, as explained earlier.
During the years that followed, Mamata lifted up her image as a street-fighter, leading demonstrations against the Left Front government in Bengal. Exploiting the growing popular discontent with the ruling CPI(M)’s arrogant and oppressive acts, she emboldened her image as an alternative political personality, to which the disgruntled people gravitated. She also created a sympathy wave in her favour by projecting herself as a victim of assaults by the CPI(M) goons – which were factual, as evident from the media reports and photographs. Her first major success was in the 1984 Lok Sabha polls, when she defeated the CPI(M) veteran Somnath Chatterjee and entered Parliament. Due to conflicts between her personal ambition and the Congress leadershsip, she left the Congress and formed her own party Trinamul Congress in 1997. In 1999, she joined the BJP-led NDA (National Democratic Alliance) which was in power at Delhi at that time.
Mamata’s record of opportunist upward mobility in politics
Soon after her joining the NDA, she was appointed a minister of Railways in the BJP-led Cabinet. During this spell, she was accused by her opponents of recruiting her own Trinamul Party activists only to various posts in the railways. But in early 2001, she suddenly walked out of the NDA government protesting against corruption allegedly indulged in by BJP ministers. Two years later, in September 2023, in a u-turn, she returned to the NDA. As a reward, she was made a cabinet minister. It was an excellent example of her opportunist tactics to further her personal political interests.
In the general elections that followed in 2004, Mamata aligned with the BJP in a joint front. But most of those candidates of the alliance lost all over India, with Mamata being the only one to be elected from Bengal to the Lok Sabha. The newly elected Congress-led UPA formed the government, where Mamata no longer had a chance of a cabinet post. She therefore deserted her former BJP patrons of the NDA, and returned to her old constituency in Bengal. But she suffered a series of setbacks. She and her party lost control of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation in the 2005 local elections. Her party also failed to gain majority in the 2006 assembly elections.
To overcome the setbacks, Mamata as usual resorted to her old gimmicks to catch public attention. On August 4, 2006, in the Lok Sabha in Delhi, she hurled her resignation papers at the deputy Speaker Charanjit Singh Atwal. But in the meanwhile, she found an opportunity to revive her image and base of popularity when the inept CPI(M) chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, in his ambition to industrialize Bengal took the rash step to occupy lands of farmers in Nandigram in October 2005, to allow a corporate company to set up a motor car manufacturing factory there. Denied any adequate compensation and relief by the Left government for loss of their lands, these farmers were looking for an avenue for protests. Mamata jumped into the scene and rallied the disgruntled farmers against the Left Front government. Her agitation played an important role in the defeat of the three decades old CPI(M)-led government in Bengal in 2011, and her emergence as the chief minister of that state after the elections.
This political career of Mamata’s was summed up in raw pithy terms by a woman friend of mine whom I recently met in Kolkata. Borrowing slang terms from Bengali popular culture, she said: “Mamata started as a nachuni (dancer – referring to her demonstration on the bonnet of Jayaprakash Narayan’s car in 1977). Then she became a political chinal (a coquette – referring to her record of wooing BJP to enter its cabinet in Delhi). And after that, as a kutni (a female pimp ) she recruited followers for her party by promising benefits. Finally, she has now become a bariwoli (a landlady running a brothel – describing the style of her governance in Bengal).”
Modi and Mamata as rulers
Mamata Banerjee has emerged in Bengal as a regional female mini-replica of Modi – in sari and chappals. She not only shares the first alphabet `M’, but resembles him in her behavior in public, with her crude witless outbursts against Opposition parties and any voice of protest by civil society. Like Modi, her mind is filled up with petty prejudices, and she reacts to any criticism with the same ugly knee-jerk responses as Modi. She has adopted Modi’s repressive measures to suppress protests, and to protect mafia dons in Bengal on whom she depends to sustain her rule.
She is now facing a crisis in Bengal following popular outbursts against her mishandling of the case of rape and murder of a young medico in the R.G. Kar hospital in Kolkata. Initially, she dismissed it as a minor incident, comparing it with similar regular rape cases in other parts of India. To assuage the sentiments of the staff of that hospital, she transferred her protégée Sandip Ghosh, the principal of that college, to another hospital. The judiciary’s intervention frustrated her efforts to protect Ghosh, who is now in judicial custody – thanks to the CBI-headed investigation, which is revealing the wider network of alignment of corrupt hospital authorities and the criminal underworld, under the patronage of the Mamata government . The junior doctors all over Bengal are up in arms, going on strike and staging sit-in dharnas in front of her official headquarters.
To cope with the crisis, Mamata is again going back to her old tactics. She is propping up herself in the image of a sympathetic listener to the grievances of the junior doctors, by inviting them for talks – but at the same time rejecting their demand for a transparent reportage of their talks through the visual media, so that the public can watch what actually transpired during the talks. Following her usual hypocritical politics, she recently organized a march in Kolkata loudly protesting against the rape and murder of the young medico, while totally remaining indifferent to the stark reality that the incident took place under her administration.
We might as well rename her. The name by which she goes by, Mamata, implies sympathy, affection and mercifulness. But judging by her record of misbehavior towards the victims of her misrule, and her chicanery to deprive them of their rights, she should be renamed Nir-Mamata (meaning cruelty and mercilessness).
Sumanta Banerjee is a political commentator and writer, is the author of In The Wake of Naxalbari’ (1980 and 2008); The Parlour and the Streets: Elite and Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Calcutta (1989) and ‘Memoirs of Roads: Calcutta from Colonial Urbanization to Global Modernization.’ (2016).
