When Mamata Banerjee, the West Bengal chief minister and chief opposition leader rolled into one, launched her panchayat election campaign nearly four months ago, she chose Hutmora in Purulia, one of the hottest and most backward districts of the state, for her first public address.

"We will give you more loans, will construct roads for you and arrange for jobs for your sons and daughters. I shall require another six months to offer you some more benefits,” she told the people, while going on to add more to that list, according to a report in the Economic Times on December 3 last year.

On Monday, as the state election commission (SEC), moved the Calcutta high court against the Trinamool Congress government’s decision to announce a two-phase panchayat election (on April 26 and 30) without policing by central paramilitary troops, as sought by the poll panel, those simple folks in Purulia, and elsewhere, must be relooking at the time-frame given by their chief minister. Six months, from now, for the elections? Six months for more promises to be brought about? Or six months for the post-poll plans for their implementation?

The last four months since Banerjee addressed the rally in the Maoist-affected Jangalmahal areas of the state can go in the accounts book as bad loan. For the poor folks, the counting begins now.

In these four months, Banerjee hasn’t said or done much, beyond writing harmlessly inane words on Facebook in support of Sanjay Dutt in the aftermath of the supreme court’s validation of the actor’s jail term in the Mumbai blasts case and inanely harmless words on her proximity to the actor’s actor-father Sunil Dutt and the latter’s love for fish and roshogolla. Okay, that’s slightly manufactured but even without it, it’s a record of sorts, given the accident-prone appetite to drive her motormouth.
 
By December, when she embarked on the panchayat election campaign, Banerjee’s most contentious decisions were already taken and done with: she had withdrawn her railway minister from Manmohan Singh’s cabinet, and subsequently her party’s support to the coalition led by Singh, with the latter leading to the state Congress officially withdrawing its pretension to be a coalition partner in the Banerjee government.

Evidently, she was reserving strength of her vocal cords for the winter-spring collection of pre-panchayat poll rallies, having played her cards and outed the aces well in time.

And it made sense all the way — the “ekush maash” (21 months) governance of Trinamool Congress may not be “shostir shaash” (sigh of relief) for the people, as the government’s ads put it in Bengal, but it still remains a welcome change much beyond the assumed honeymoon period of a new administration. The people, despite the irritation, exasperation and frustration with the antics of Banerjee and her acolytes, are yet to fume in desperation, for they had seen the ‘alternative’ as the norm for over three decades.

The other alternative, the Congress, is equally abysmal, if not downright immature.

So what prompted mercurial Mamata to suddenly go against the SEC and risk the elections? And over something apparently as petty as a three-phase (SEC’s demand) versus two-phase polling, and posting of paramilitary troops (SEC’s demand)?

While Left Front chairman Biman Bose and state Congress leader Pradip Bhattacharya feel it is a “conspiracy” by a government running scared of the results going against the overall lack of governance, it is worth wondering whether this assumption is a jot too dense and introspective for Banerjee to waste time over. She did not, for instance, calculate the effects of her remark when she called the ‘bluff’ in the Park Street rape case early last year (only for the ‘bluff’ come back to haunt her as she proved to be horribly wrong), or transferring the officer who cracked the case against the chief minister’s apparent fancy, or calling every other proponent of a dissenting view a ‘Maoist’, or prop up APJ Abdul Kalam’s name for presidency, or any of her numerous other verbal profligacy.

She made those remarks/decisions for a simple reason: she wanted to. And, perhaps, to show she cannot be pressured. And behind that might lie a smart political packaging, for she has built her career on the mantra of indomitable — all heart and spirit, zilch shrewd reasoning.

Knowing her pat style of working, it can be assumed she made her panchayat minister, Subtara Mukherjee, announce the dates and bandobast for precisely the same reason: she didn’t want to be seen as being pressured by state election commissioner Mira Pande into accepting decisions not to her liking.

The elections, if they get deferred, as a long-drawn legal battle would surely ensure, are only a casualty in Mamata Banerjee’s battle to uphold her ego — a collateral damage, as they say in war reportage. It may not be a sign of accepting defeat. Not as yet.