Mamata Bannerjee steals the thunder from UPA-II

First time ever, Mamata Banerjee could transfer her characteristic unpredictable gambit to a larger uncertainty of political economy. Using what matters in Bengal politics, which is a pro-people, pro-minority and anti-Centre stance, she succeeded in showing the UPA-2 its footloose practices to the point of breaking it. In the eye of the storm is the opening of the retail trading for FDI and withdrawal of subsidy for gas and hiking of diesel prices, all a recipe for marginalization of the poor and the minorities in a corporate dominated economy of India.

Politics of reforms, here again, exhibits its hazy means-ends relationship. No government, howsoever powerful it may be, can assume an overriding decision-making power in matters of bringing foreign funds, as it erodes domestic legitimacy. Bereft of popular acceptance, reform measures that create an inevitable insecurity and crisis in livelihood of ordinary citizen eat into the credibility of the Government. Even if it is a government in majority, or it is in minority, either way, reforms sacrifice both the government and the people. In this sense, reforms make the most achieving government hostage to its antics and throw the stakes of its citizenry into the winds. Mamata decided not to be a part of such a process of gambling with the people and pulled the plug.

In her twenty odd minutes of press conference to declare the withdrawal of support from the Central Government, she established an uncanny but real linkage between Centre’s economic follies with communal riots in Assam. She sounded like a practical politician in linking up the tragedy of commons at the hands of UPA government with its Assam counterpart which could not prevent a preventable riot. That Mamata’s well known acceptance of victims and provisions for sheltering them in relief camps is not just a mere public show off came out in her serious concern about Assam riots, which she didn’t dither to call ‘communal’. Indeed Mamata could see the invisible link between economic reforms and communal politics as it is played out at a stone’s throw by the Congress. Her announcement that her ministers will resign after Jumma Namaz on Friday makes her a darling of the masses in Bengal. Indeed there are many dimensions to her apparently inexplicable act of connecting Assam riots to FDI in retail and the overall policy drift of the UPA.

It is increasingly clear that in the course of riots, Bengali speaking Muslims of the East Bengal origin has been the only target, large number of whom have to cross over to neighbouring state of West Bengal for shelter.

Except making whatever public announcements, Congress as the ruling party, both at the centre and the State didn’t have any qualms to take them back home. Just as the Congress party unilaterally passed a cabinet decision to allow entry of FDI in retail in great peril to the existence of small traders in the very sector, in the same way, they have left scores of displaced victim at the mercy of Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC) administration. The criterion of land record to decide whether someone is an Indian or not in Bodoland not only violates the principle of no harm to the already harmed, but it contributes to turning genuine Indian citizens into stateless persons. The ruling party is dancing to the tune of BTC and failing to uphold constitutional principles.

In such an hour of crisis, Mamata not only withdrew support from UPA, but by raking up the issue of communal riots in Assam, she brought the truth out of claustrophobic interpretations given to Bodoland riots. Although she didn’t elaborate, but anyone can relate mention of protesting against Assam communal riots to the actually existing reality. As a glaring example of how UPA’s policies are skewed towards the marginalized and minority-ized sections of society, Assam riot stands out as one example of neglect and injustice by the Central Government.

As a statesman of a very different kind who can listen to the ground, her decision to send minister’s resignation to the Prime Minister after Friday prayer carries a lot of meaning both nationally and internationally. Nationally it marks a strong anti-Hindutva stance. It also communicates a message of peace, brotherhood and love for the Muslims that a country polarized tends to forget. It also is a re-affirmation of solemnity of Islam in the face of deliberate attempts to the film-ic mischief. Mamata establishes the right chord of concern for the helpless victims of communal clashes in Assam by connecting her FDI protest with deeply emotional pronouncements about Friday resignations. She couched the idiom of protest in terms of practical Islam that overcomes the otherwise meaninglessness of political acts such as entry and exit.

Mamata’s exit has thrown up challenges to other secular and anti-communal forces and parties to evolve a common strategy. Far from being clear about the impact of these reforms, parties like Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party are calculating each other’s response and playing a zero sum game. In such a situation there could again be a kind of reconsolidation of parties within UPA just for the sake of avoiding an early election. Such a mutual bickering is going to affect the polity in a negative way as continuation of UPA is going to bring a policy regime that does not care for the minorities and the marginalized.

Prasenjit Biswas in Two Circles. Here

Why there is a chance for Mayawati to become PM?

The Congress party is vulnerable because of its own misdeeds, starting from the nuclear deal that was pushed through Parliament with purchased votes, to the blind eye turned to the loot of the country in the 2G scam. Anna Hazare has demonstrated the widespread public revulsion that exists for the UPA government; character assassination of Team Anna members may remove the personnel, but not the public revulsion. Such is the state of public nausea that voters are willing to tolerate a timid and unimaginative chief minister like Maharashtra’s Prithviraj Chavan so long as he’s clean, as a DNA survey showed this week. The opposition parties must think of maximising the opportunity on the horizon; however, on current evidence it looks a tall order. The BJP has over-estimated its own strength and its ability to deliver an alternative. The fact that some of its worthies still think that the 84-year-old rath yatri LK Advani is a PM candidate, despite the fact that he led a losing campaign in 2009, demonstrates the bankruptcy of their political strategy.

India has had several experiments with non-Congress, non-BJP governments, but they have not lasted the full course. This does not mean a future experiment will also come up short. But the regional parties have to get their act together for 2012’s two milestones: the UP elections and India’s Presidential election. Mayawati looks on course to decide the first; perhaps she should take the lead in strategising an alternative for the next Parliamentary election. (I don’t give importance to the anti-Mayawati reports in our casteist media, and I don’t think the voters will either.) And the others, be it Mamata, Jayalalithaa, Nitish, etc, should follow her lead. Doing so would be far better than to delude oneself into following Modi’s lead, because his is a road that will lead nowhere in a hurry.

Aditya Sinha in DNA. Here

State of the sisterhood

The headlines are euphoric. Mamata Banerjee, J Jayalalithaa, Mayawati and Sheila Dikshit, just four women now rule over 400 million Indians. Three cheers for gender justice. Yet, there is no skirting the big question: are they about to swing a new deal for India's women? Some would argue, don't hold your breath. 

"They might not be game changers for other women," says Akhila Sivadas,  executive director, Centre for Advocacy and Research. "But at least they have been able to come up in a highly competitive environment that is often hostile to women."

The four women chief ministers are pictures in contrast. In her elegant saris, Sheila Dikshit is the silver-haired patrician who calls journalists beta, especially when they are asking tough questions. The unyielding Mayawati rules Uttar Pradesh by diktat, transferring officials who displease her faster than you can say ‘statue'. Jayalalithaa encourages full ashtang namaskars by genuflecting party members. Only Mamata is the untried, untested chief minister who comes to power with zero ostentation and enormous expectation for single-handedly demolishing 34 years of unbroken Communist rule.

It's early days yet to judge the third coming of Jayalalithaa or the first of Mamata in terms of what this means to the women of their states. But the rise to power of this sisterhood, says Guha, "has to be set off against the continuing discrimination against women in society". Adds social activist Biraj Patnaik: "There is great symbolic value in having these women in power." Significantly, despite their ideological differences, this sorority remains united on one issue: the Women's Reservation Bill, passed in the Rajya Sabha but now stuck in the lower house.

It's tempting to see the rise of so many women at one point in time as a great victory for women everywhere. But women have a long way to go and many hurdles — female foeticide, dowry, malnutrition — to overcome. 

Women in positions of power at the national and state level might not immediately usher in a new deal for other women. Their achievements (and scandals) are perhaps benchmarked against their male competitors. But their presence could  mean a good, hard knock at yet another glass ceiling.

Namita Bhandare in Hindustan Times. More Here

The voter votes not for an idea or an ideology

Poribarton is the word we will hear a lot of for a while. The defeat of the Left in West Bengal has been reduced to this single word, a desire for change so strong that even though most people do not seem to believe that Mamata will necessarily improve their situation, they still want to see the Left out of power. This slow defeat of the Left, long in coming, is the last whimper of ideology in Indian politics. The BJP had long renounced its pretensions to such a claim, the DMK, a party born on a rationalist, secessionist, anti-Brahminical platform, has long morphed into a local imitation of the Congress, with its own cult of family.

But ideology is a big word; ideas can be smaller and more focused—the promise of good governance, a programme for roads or education or health or even administrative accountability. Neither Mamata nor Jayalalithaa nor the winners in Kerala or Assam have won for these reasons. 

Yet, the only thing that the elections in the four states have in common apart from their lack of ideas is a high voter turnout. How do we account for this paradox? If politics with its lack of ideas is so dispiriting that we need outsiders to inject ideas through fasts, why is it that the voter does not think so, and why is there such disconnect between the pontificating political discourse in Delhi and what actually unfolds in elections in this country?

The voter votes not for an idea or an ideology but for the possibility of individual benefit. This possibility is not as straightforward as accounting for the money, a television or alcohol handed out even though each counts. If roads matter, they will be weighed in, it is just that the importance given to each factor varies from individual to individual. And since the individuals whose aggregated vote decides most elections are not from the middle class, this class feels left out because its own individual benefit is often discounted in such a result.

This is a simple conclusion but one that irritates the elite no end. It may be true that the CPM and the DMK were both embodiments of certain ideas, but the response was not to an idea, whether it be the Marxism of the CPM or the atheistic Dravidianism of the DMK, but to the possibility that the old structures would change for the better, that they would have some access to the institutions of power. In the case of the CPM, this possibility was real for more than a decade but that changed with the creation of a new elite that controlled power. Mamata is not an idea, she is a possibility as easily accepted as renounced if things do not work out.

It is easy to be cynical or sceptical about such a democracy but the fact remains it delivers in ways that the elite fails to anticipate. A Mayawati, Mulayam or Lalu are products of such a system, and for all the mockery made of them by the elite, they have changed the political landscape of the country. It is difficult to ascribe ideology or even ideas to the politics these three actually practice, but over the past 20 years, they have reshaped Bihar and UP by dismantling the hierarchy of caste.

Hartosh Singh Bal in Open. More Here

Mamata Banerjee is the face of Muslim Revenge

Basu's crucial error was his compromise with parochialism in order to sustain his vote base when his economic policies had exhausted their ability to deliver. This retreat was symbolised by his ban on the study of English at primary school level in 1982. He advertised this as a triumph for the mother tongue. It was nothing of the kind. It was a retreat into the narrow mind of regionalism by a party that had lost its imagination. Unable to create jobs, it sought to cynically exploit a barren emotionalism. By the time the decision was reversed in 1999, half a generation from the lower middle class and poor-or, those who needed English most for upward mobility-had fallen behind. Basu's own grandchildren went to La Martiniere, of course.

This ban came during precisely those years when the young began to recognise that English had become the language of aspiration in India; it was no longer "foreign". Modern jobs demanded, increasingly, English language skills. English, once guardian of colonial rule and its fauxaccented servants, has, today, been assimilated to such an extent that it is part of Bollywood's "Hindi" lyrics. The unique aspect of the "item number" Sheila ki jawaani is not that Sheila isn't going to give you her body (there was not much chance of getting it anyway), but that more than half the song is in English. Bengal's young paid a silent price so the CPI(M) could remain in power.

The second swivel-mistake was soft-secularism, the unspoken Leftist assumption that Bengal's Muslims- who constitute over 30 per cent of the state's effective vote- could be taken for granted if you protected their life without ensuring their livelihood. Muslims bought this shoddy deal for a long while, until the Sachar Commission report laid out facts of their unemployment levels in government jobs. Mamata Banerjee is the face of Muslim revenge. The Left bastion could not survive the collapse of its strongest pillar.

The Left ruled longer than it deserved to because cadres filled the chasm created by vanishing ideas and ideology. It was as if by the 1990s the CPI(M) had pawned its intellect, and begun feeding off diminishing returns. By 2000 it was dining off alibis. And yet the gold dust of electoral success persuaded them that power was eternal.

Mamata Banerjee has proved that even in Bengal power is terminal.

M J Akbar in India Today. More Here

Mamata Banerjee's Historic Thunder

Friday afternoon, Mamata Banerjee’s long march to “liberate” Bengal from the world’s longest democratically elected communist rule ended in a green revolution that was reminiscent of the revolutions — velvet, orange, rose, et al — that once felled the Berlin Wall and one communist regime in eastern Europe after another.

The big difference is this: none of those revolutions, except perhaps the one led by Lech Walesa’s Solidarity in Poland, was the making of a single leader the way the one in Calcutta has been Mamata’s very own.

It was in the making for several years, but the way it gathered momentum in the last few weeks was nothing short of a blitzkrieg that knocked the supposedly mighty edifice of the CPM down without the party leaders having a clue to what was about to hit them.

She began her campaign to end the CPM’s rule with the slogan: “Now’s the time” — that became the call to action in Prague’s Velvet Revolution. It proved illusory in 2001 but it has happened now.

But the slogan will take on a completely different meaning now. From now onwards, her years of street fight will be yesterday’s story. Both for Bengal and for Mamata, the story that unfolds from this morning has to be about her vision and work to create a tomorrow. It is not the ordinary change of government that comes and goes with every election, changing little in people’s lives.

For everything that she plans to do, she may have to undo plenty of things. The historic turnabout of the traditionally Leftist Bengal to her side is clear evidence that she has to reverse many of the supposedly irreversible legacies that have led to Bengal’s economic and social decline.

Many of these expectations are about undoing things that made the people so angry with the CPM and so despairing of Bengal under it. Before she does anything to bring industries to Bengal, create jobs or dismantle the unconstitutional and illegal power structures created by the CPM, the people would like her to end the tyrannical “party society” that had its stranglehold on every aspect of the common people’s lives everywhere in Bengal. The breaking of the party society would make the people breathe more freely, especially in the villages.

This party-first culture crippled many things — economy, health services, the police and the administration. But its most damaging assault was on education which, under the long Left rule, became a matter of petty, sectarian politics that turned teachers’ bodies — in schools, colleges and universities — into what Chinese communists call “work units” or “propaganda teams”.

One of the first things she might need to undo is this complete politicisation of education in Bengal.

Ashis Chakrabarti in The Telegraph. More Here

Muslims were behind the triumph of  Mamata Banerjee
Trinamul bags over 90 of the 125 seats with sizeable Muslim electorates 

Of the 125 seats where Muslims have sizeable votes, the Left Front lost 90-odd today — a repeat of the 2009 results when it had trailed in 97 of these Assembly segments.

In 2006, when the Left swept to power with 235 seats in the Assembly, it had won 102 of these 125 seats.

Areas with high minority concentrations in Cooch Behar, South Dinajpur, North Dinajpur and Malda overwhelmingly voted for the Mamata-led alliance, sending the signal that Singur, Sachar and Nandigram were fresh in their minds. Hooghly, Howrah, North and South 24-Parganas and even the Red belt of Burdwan presented a similar picture.

Since 2009, the CPM had tried to woo back its Muslim voters by announcing job reservations and socio-economic programmes under the Multi-Sectoral Development Plan.

“There is no denying that the CPM tried its best to reclaim Muslim votes. But the minorities had a big fear,” Trinamul secretary-general and leader of the Opposition Partha Chatterjee said.

“They realised that the Left’s admission of mistakes was just a ploy to get back their support. The Muslims didn’t forget that the CPM was out to grab their land.”

The minority drift away from the Left had started well before the Lok Sabha elections. A year earlier, in the 2008 rural polls, the front lost more than 50 per cent of the gram panchayat seats and four zilla parishads to the Opposition in the Left’s first electoral setback after Singur and Nandigram.

In the years since Singur erupted, Mamata has done her bit to woo the minorities, who may have been wary of her earlier association with the BJP.

Wearing a burqa and offering namaz on the dharna manch in Singur was part of the attempt.

She also reminded the minorities that she had engaged late Trinamul MP Ajit Panja to fight in court so that the azaan could continue to be broadcast over loudspeakers.

Trinamul workers went around the state telling the minorities that even during her NDA days, Mamata had fought against the anti-terror legislation Pota, which she considered anti-Muslim. Wherever she went across Bengal during the campaign, Mamata would speak of Ram and Rahim or Ishwar and Allah.

After taking over as railway minister, she introduced trains in areas with minority concentrations, allowed candidates to take recruitment tests in Urdu and announced that a station would be named after Bahadur Shah Zafar. All this paid off.

Anindya Sengupta in The Telegraph. More Here