“Mamatadidi; why this colourveri di. There are more important things to do and perform in W. Bengal than changing the skyline to blue.”

(A reader’s comment on an online report on the Mamata Banerjee Blue drive)

 

Looking down from an aircraft, Kolkata seems the same as it ever was—India Green robbed of its charm by pollution, mirror-like blobs of ponds, winding brown waterways, and gated highrise communities of every colour. Except blue, unless your peripheral vision catches a flash of it here and there, and you begin to wonder if this mercurial city suddenly grew a new agenda from its armpit while you were away.

 

Only when you’re driving into the city from the airport does the colour blue come at you like insinuations. Brand new blue, too, as if no more than a few days old. By the time you’re in central Kolkata, approaching the Central Business District, blue has become more than the statement of intent it was in the city’s northwest airport zone; and in the south, you see it poised to holler victory over architecture that had for decades, if not more than a century, been of laid-back, indeterminate complexion.

 

The first indication to ordinary Kolkatans that West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee might have in mind a new destiny for Kolkata was when the swooping strings of blue-and-white Chinese fairy lights that festooned the dark-brick façade of Writers’ Buildings over the New Year remained in place for weeks. The confirmatory evidence came when the firebrick red-navy blue police stations on Kolkata’s topologically crazy periphery became the first victims of the chief minister’s new pet djinn, the Blue Brush Beast, and were given two coats each of white and ultramarine, which the sun then undertook to progressively bleach to an unhappy, flat Bondi blue.

 

But it isn’t something as simple as the West Bengal boss executive’s vision for a new Kolkata: such is the scale and momentum of the blueing of Kolkata that the realisation seems inescapable that blue has become Mamata Banerjee’s monomania, an escalation from her idée fixe that red is an abomination in West Bengal’s post-Independence history and needs to be obliterated.

 

In fact, steeped in history though her ongoing repainting drive might seem—it’s the biggest and costliest city maintenance project ever undertaken in Kolkata—the only historical fact here is that Mamata Banerjee’s sense of Bengal’s long history, difficult and incomparable in equal measure, is patchy and short-term. It’s as if her Bengal was born, with its full complement of hair and teeth and wearing a dhoti, sometime around mid-20th century. But because of a certain ideological, perhaps educational, shortsightedness, she can’t exploit, for the purposes of politics, development or culture, all the history that is available for the taking.

 

So even as she clothes buildings, road signage, electricity poles, flyovers, bridges, park railings and even curbstones wholesale in blue (and some white, so as not to overdo it), splurging tens of crores of rupees she has diverted from stalled development work, she leaves it to her attendant covey of ministers to hammer into the public’s head that, for her Bengal, “the sky is the limit”.

 

Bengalis are suckers for historical parallels. She could have squeezed the last political drop out of one of the proudest moments in Bengal’s subaltern history—Neel Bidr?h?, or the Indigo Revolt, an indigo farmers’ nonviolent uprising that harried an already-spooked colonial Britain two years after the Army of the Bengal Presidency had whipped up the Revolt of 1857. But she didn’t.

 

“She doesn’t see the link between British colonialism and Central-internecine colonialism,” says historian Bhashyata Raha. “Her sudden penchant for blue seems to have arisen from a vacuum—except that it hasn’t: it might have from a historical vacuum, but not a personal one. That doesn’t make it sensible to paint the city blue, of course—no politician in India today, especially not someone engaged in redefining the norm, can afford to do anything that is ahistorical, and even more so not the uniformalising of one of the most colourful cities in the country.”

 

Nor does she seem to be aware of the irony built into Sovan Chatterjee, minister of sports Madan Mitra and urban development minister Firhad Hakim’s frequent iterations that Kolkata—indeed, the 1,900-sq-km Kolkata Metropolitan Area of North and South 24-Parganas, Howrah, Hooghly and Nadia—is fated to be a “sky blue city”. The entire project, from conception to its ongoing execution, fits like a glove the dictionary definition of “blue-sky”: “fanciful; impractical; without regard to future application”.

 

Clearly, ‘blue’ is standing in for many things other than mere fancy: it’s a sign of Mamata’s changing ideological colour—the party’s signature green, which replaced the Left Front’s red carpets inside Writers’ Buildings and the interiors of administrative temples like Corporation Building, has become secondary to her deeply personal blue; it’s a sign of the petulant whimsicality that asserted itself after pressure twisted her brassy composure (pressure to conform to the citizenry’s simple need for dependability; pressure to deliver on serial, outlandish promises; pressure to apportion blame sensibly). Finally, to observers, blue testifies to her misconception that changing the small things will placate the really giant issues threatening to unload on her.

 

Her personal honesty—flaunted in her aesthetics of austerity rather than in her negation of opinions other than her own—has also, according to reports, begun to show cracks. Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) contractors privately complain that they have been advised to buy the blue and white acrylic paints from Abhishek Hardware, which advertises itself as a ‘One Stop Paint Shop’. The store is located on Kalighat Road, not far from Mamata’s residence, and has as its ‘managers’ Abhishek Banerjee, who heads the All India Trinamool Yuva (AITY) and the party’s cyber cell and is the son of Amit Banerjee, one of Mamata’s six brothers. The KMC, headed by mayor Sovan Chatterjee, has already spent more than '2.5 crore, and this is just what’s in the books. 

 

Much of the city’s south and central areas, the focus of Mamata’s oddly emphatic beautification pledges, have already been coated. The vast 77-acre Salt Lake Stadium received three frantic washes of blue within a week to prepare it for her visit on February 25. Standing out in stark contrast to the urban dereliction around them are some sapphire setus, the 78-year-old iconic Alipore Bridge, park gates, lampposts, traffic signals, street signage, streetside metre boxes, bus shelters and even tree trunks.

 

As any bleeding-heart bhodrolok would tell you, she shouldn’t have touched the trees. Bonani Kakkar of the People United for Better Living in Calcutta (PUBLIC) called the repainting of trees along Victoria Memorial and Race Course, the open, leafy lung of the city, “an assault on the sensibilities” and “a strange adventure in anti-aesthetics”. But the artist Shuvaprasanna, whom Mamata appointed as chairman of the West Bengal Heritage Commission as payback for his loyalty, merely cautions against using “oil colours” in favour of “lime paint” (another name for, ironically, ‘whitewash’). But the paints being used are enamel: two coats of white up to 7 ft up the trunk and then bands of cobalt. Unlike painted trees elsewhere in the world, these paints are not meant to wash off after a season: even though it is not in the interests of the cyclical mafia contracts that plague developmental work in West Bengal, annual repainting will cost too much.

 

Not that anybody seems worried about the absurdity of splurging money critical to infrastructural maintenance on propping up many buildings that should be condemned with exoskeletons of pretty paint: budgetary literacy and economic forecasting in the Mamata Banerjee government are notional things. Amit Mitra, the corporate heavyweight whom Banerjee had initially brought in as adviser on a public-private partnerships committee but elevated to the post of state finance minister—thinking that budget = math = corporate honcho = hands-on politician—has, in his year at the most important position in Mamata’s government, presented only a financial statement instead of a proper budget, which gave rise to justified apprehensions that neither he nor anybody else in the state government has a clue about the existing state kitty, the potential state kitty and real-world state fiscal policy.

 

The paint cost for the makeover will come from the yearly maintenance fund, which exists mostly as an illusionary bookkeeping title. With no free reserves to dip into, Sovan Chatterjee, whom people see less as mayor of Kolkata and more as Mamata Banerjee’s unofficial photographer, virtually gave up managing the city’s creaking sewerage and lunarscape roads, and the city turned into a swamp littered with broken axles and cracked heads. In January this year, Banerjee reacted to vocal public dismay by stripping Chatterjee of three key departments, including the paramount revenue assessment and collection, which has never before been out of the KMC’s hands since as far back as the first mayor, Chittaranjan Das, and then Subhas Chandra Bose and Bidhan Chandra Roy. Chatterjee’s demotion was as much a commentary on his uselessness as an indication that Mamata, up against unrelenting financial stonewalling by the centre, needed locally-generated funds, and quickly.

 

Since then, though, Mamata hasn’t let another such moment of clarity cloud her judgement. She allowed the unfazed mayor to continue as her enabler. After the KMC’s 141 wards were brought under the Kolkata Police’s jurisdiction in September 2011—the last, remaining tracts of the 24 South Parganas prised away from the venal grip of the West Bengal Police, which has long been teetering, to use über-cop Julio Ribiero’s unforgettable words, on “the edge of criminality”—the outpost police stations on the city’s perimeter went blue. This was Phase I, during which park railings in much of the city that had not weeks ago been painted black-and-gold under Mamata’s orders, were laboriously scuffed and repainted blue-and-white. Chatterjee allotted '80 lakh to Phase I (after sanctioning '60 lakh late last year to repaint the city every colour but red—green, mauve, orange, yellow, black, gold).

 

Even as this story goes to press, the tide of blue is creeping north and northwest, galloping through the city’s transport aorta, EM Bypass, its most visible avenue of entry and exit, VIP Road, the airport, and one of the most important roadways in eastern India, the transnational Jessore Road (NH34/35).