In the 50th year since joining student politics in 1974, Banerjee faces the challenge of maintaining supremacy in Bengal politics
Fifty years ago, in 1974, a teenage woman from a downtrodden family living in a tiles-roofed home along the stinking Adiganga canal in south Kolkata’s Kalighat neighbourhood enrolled at the Jogamaya Devi College, a few kilometres from her home. She joined the Chhatra Parishad, the student wing of the Congress, that very year.
Over the next five decades, she singlehandedly changed the course of Bengal politics, humbling almost all her political rivals. She split the Congress in 1997, she dethroned the Left in 2011 and she has so far also managed to prevent a saffron takeover of the state.
Now 69, Mamata Banerjee continues to live in the same house, with some modifications and installations of some modern facilities like air conditioners and trade mills, even as she has already served multiple terms as a Union minister and is currently ruling West Bengal for 13 years.
Her electoral career also turned 40, beginning with the 1984 Lok Sabha election victory against CPI(M) heavyweight Somnath Chatterjee which helped her arrive in Bengal’s political theatre as a giant killer.
Even though she now uses the iPad and fitness bands, she wears the same appearance that made her popular – a blue-striped white cotton saree and blue slippers. She has remained as energetic as ever.
“She hasn’t changed much. She continues to make decisions on impulse, without going through any great deal of paperwork. Her guiding philosophy has remained “poth e amay poth dekhabe” (roads will show me the way). And luxury still has no appeal to her,” says Sudipta Sengupta, a veteran journalist who has been covering Mamata Banerjee and state politics since the early 1990s.
Sengupta says he does not remember any instance of Banerjee going on a vacation or pleasure trip and indulging in any form of luxury. “She had never visited any hill station as a tourist before she went to Darjeeling as the chief minister,” he tells Outlook.
He describes Banerjee as someone who trusts blindly when she trusts someone but is at the same time susceptible to becoming suspicious of someone all of a sudden. “She is soft as a human being and a caring person but the pressure of handling power may have taken a toll on her compassion in the later years,” Sengupta says.
While Banerjee may have not changed much, she has changed state politics in many ways. Sengupta lists three major impacts: she has liberated politics from ideological confinements and made pragmatism the central point; her rise has increased women’s presence in political leadership positions; and she has replaced the refinement of the bhadrolok culture in the political language with more plebian political expressions.
When she joined student politics, the Congress ruled both India and Bengal. By the time she passed out of college and got deeply involved in political activism beyond the campus, the Left Front swept the Congress out of power through the watershed 1977 election.
For 34 years since then, her political career has been that of an opposition leader. She could not hide these oppositional traits even when part of the government at the Centre – for example, the multiple resignations that she gave from the Atal Bihari Vajpayee cabinet on issues ranging from corruption to price rises or hikes in public transport fares.
Even after becoming the chief minister, she opposed the 2012 rail budget presented by railway minister Dinesh Trivedi, who belonged to her own party, for proposing a fare hike without consulting her first. She made the minister resign and enforced a rollback.
“She loves playing the victim, she loves playing the rebel, and she does not like to be dictated,” says a TMC veteran who has closely worked with her for many years, adding, “ She is also susceptible to flattery.”
One of the major changes she brought to Bengal politics is that of a personality cult. The Left was all about collective leadership, while Congress also had its own bureaucracy. But Banerjee was a phenomenon, ready to walk the extra mile to champion her minority positions.
Perhaps two examples perfectly reflect her political success in becoming the person who mattered the most in state politics.
Subrata Mukherjee, who had served as a minister in Siddhartha Shankar Ray’s last Congress ministry in Bengal (1972-77) and mentored Banerjee in the early years of her career, accepted Banerjee’s leadership and joined the newborn TMC. Mukherjee later fell out with her, and parted ways, only to return to her fold.
Banerjee left the Congress rebelling against state Congress president Somen Mitra. By 2009, Mitra had accepted her leadership and joined the TMC.
“How she treated Mukherjee is no less interesting,” says a senior TMC leader who requested anonymity, “Though she took him back, she never trusted him politically. She gave him no organisational responsibility. But she respected his administrative abilities and entrusted him with important ministerial portfolios.”
Banerjee is special in many ways. Almost all major women politicians in South Asia had some kind of privilege to start with. From prime ministers Indira Gandhi, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, Benazir Bhutto, Sheikh Hasina, and Begum Khaleda Zia to Indian chief minister Jayaram Jayalalitha, Mayawati and Vasundhara Raje Scindhia – they either inherited their position of power from fathers, husbands or male mentors or had family wealth to rely on.
Mamata Banerjee had nothing. She was neither heir to anyone else’s position nor had any wealth. In all senses, she has been her only capital.
A veteran journalist who has been watching her closely for about two decades says that Banerjee always felt uncomfortable in structured atmospheres and formalities and she continues to be so.
According to the journalist, as the leader of the party, she knew even sub-division and block-level leaders by their names and now she knows all the district magistrates and police supers by their names.
“In the early years of her chief ministership, when some bureaucrats were older than her, she used to add the ‘dada’ suffix to their names to address them. This was unprecedented. Her predecessors, Jyoti Basu and Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, always added the ‘babu’ suffix while addressing bureaucrats. Now she calls all the officers by their names. I am not judging whether that’s good or bad, but that’s how she is.”
However, the authoritarianism that she brought with her way of doing politics has also meant the collapse of collective leadership, first at her party level and now at the administrative level.
Party leaders remember when former Kolkata Mayor Sovan Chatterjee, during a renaming ceremony of a street to honour the filmmaker, Satyajit Ray, blurted out the new name as Satyajit Ray Sarani before the chief minister announced, she instantly changed the new name of the road to Satyajit Ray Dharani.
So, every decision that the party’s local leaders, MLAs, MPs, ministers, or even panchayat and municipalities take is always described as having been “inspired by the chief minister Mamata Banerjee” -- be it the naming of newborn turtles in the state-run zoos or the inauguration of public toilet facilities.
CPI(M) leaders, however, accuse her modest lifestyle as a facade, alleging that her family has amassed huge wealth using her influence. They often highlight how the TMC’s wall graffitis no longer describe her as “satotar protik” or a symbol of honesty, which was a popular practice in the early years of the TMC.
Zaad Mahmood, an associate professor of political science at Kolkata’s Presidency University, says that Banerjee replaced the dominance of ideology-based politics in Bengal with agenda-based politics.
“When she launched her own party, her sole agenda was to remove the Left Front government, for which she could join hands with any force. Ideology did not matter. She, though, incorporated certain manobik (humane) values into her agenda-based politics to increase the appeal of her populist approach,” Mahmood says.
According to him, Banerjee should also be credited for changing the Congress way of politics in Bengal altogether. Bengal had a long history of street politics but it was the domain of the Left parties. Banerjee changed Congress’s politics by introducing street politics into it. In showing her doggedness, she even called bandhs spanning 72 hours.
He pointed out how in the 1960-70s, Congress-supporting upper caste, upper-class elites used to brand the communists as chhotolok-er party (party of chhotolok, a derogatory term for the subaltern), while currently, many middle-class and upper-middle class families in the state refer to the TMC as chhotolok-er party.
Mahmood, however, thinks that her evaluation as a politician and as the leader of Bengal should be done separately. As the leader of Bengal, she practices “governmental populism”, proactively announcing welfare schemes before demands are raised or any mass mobilisation takes place but has failed to set any long-term vision for industrialisation and employment generation.
“Some of the social welfare schemes had a very positive impact on the downtrodden. At the same time, the complete politicisation of the administration has severely weakened the administration and reduced its effectiveness,” he tells Outlook.
Mahmood considers it as her failure as the leader of Bengal that the benefits of the schemes she herself launched are not reaching many of the targeted beneficiaries, due to both corruption and politicisation.
“The contradiction can’t be missed that while she tries to portray herself as a political ascetic with a simple lifestyle, the people around her are well-known for their extravagant living,” says Mahmood.
Banerjee faced a personal electoral defeat only once – in the Nandigram assembly seat in 2021. But many political observers see this defeat as one that adds to her glory – she risked her personal electoral defeat by choosing the toughest seat for herself. But it helped her win the larger political victory by infusing new confidence and energy among her party’s rank and file.
“To speak honestly, very few leaders, not only in India but also globally, would choose the toughest seat for himself/herself. And that’s exactly why she is special. We know we are up against a phenomenal leader,” says a senior leader of West Bengal BJP who is unwilling to be named.
Two decades ago, she used to describe herself as ‘rough and tough’ and she has not shed that image. Khela Hobey (game on!) or Ladke Lenge is still the kind of language that she is used to speaking.
Now, in 2024, when her party is struggling in the face of a series of corruption charges in various recruitment processes as well as in the implementation of government schemes, can she lead her party once more to maintain supremacy over Bengal’s political sphere and mark her fiftieth year in politics with a cherishable electoral performance? The answer is due in another nine weeks.