A list can make an important difference in a person’s life. Inclusion into the list of SC or OBC can, for instance, grant access to the system of reservations which may, in turn, lead to considerable social mobility. With her Brahmin background Mamata Banerjee has never been eligible for a place on any of these lists. Instead her life-long struggle to oust the communists from Writers’ Building recently earned her a place on Time magazine’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people. Only weeks later fellow top-100 nominee Hillary Clinton dropped by Kolkata to discuss key aspects of India’s economic policy (FDI in multi-brand retail) and foreign policy (the Teesta treaty). Internationally, as well as nationally, Mamata Banerjee’s political stock has never been higher. But some suggest that her honeymoon with the Bengal electorate may be headed for a premature end.

Rise to power
The story of the political rise of Mamata Banerjee is well known and has by now acquired almost mythical qualities. Coming from a modest middle-class background, she joined student politics at an early age and went on to work her way up the Congress hierarchy during the 1980s and 1990s. In the 1990s, she hit the party’s organisational glass ceiling when she was unable to displace the established leadership and assume control of the party herself.

Frustrated with the lacklustre performance of the Bengal branch of the grand old party, which she accused of having become the CPM’s B-team, she quit in 1997/98 and launched her own Trinamool Congress. Within months, the TMC had become the main opposition in the state, confident enough to declare, in 2001, that if Bengal wanted an end to the communist rule, it was “now or never”. The electorate said, no thanks, and from then onwards, Mamata Banerjee’s star waned considerably. By 2005, she was considered almost a has-been in Bengal politics, until Singur and Nandigram turned the tide.

Re-emerging as a fiery spokesperson for small and marginal peasants, she appropriated many of the Left’s political idioms and won the support of new rural and urban constituencies, including important sections of Kolkata’s buddhijibi – the intellectuals. By 2009, she was a key constituent of the UPA and by 2011 chief minister of her home state.

Putting Bengal first
The TMC’s tie-up with the Congress – facilitated by the Left’s tactically unwise withdrawal of support for the UPA in 2008 – has granted Mamata Banerjee considerable clout in Delhi as the support of her 19 MPs is crucial for the survival of the government. The alliance, however, appears to be a marriage of convenience rather than a love marriage. Mamata Banerjee has put her foot down on a number of occasions whenever she has seen the UPA’s policies as counter-productive to her own agenda. This agenda is a self-declared populist one: Mamata Banerjee has often said that ideologically she is neither on the left nor on the right, but on the side of the people – which of course is the textbook definition of populism. This has meant that she has opposed, for instance, her own (now former) railway minister’s suggestion to increase railway fares; the UPA’s petrol price hike; and FDI in multi-brand retail, all of which she believes will work against the interests of the common man. Her recent opposition to the Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority Bill is ostensibly similarly based on a conviction that it will hurt the common man’s savings.

But perhaps more importantly she has used her influence on the UPA to cater to Bengali interests and aspirations in particular. This should come as no surprise. Mamata’s pride of being a Bengali has been a recurring theme throughout her career in politics, and an affectionate love for Sonar Bangla figures strongly in her poetry and other writings. In policy terms, she has lobbied extremely hard for a considerable debt relief package for her state in order to turn around the ostensibly bankrupt state she inherited from the Marxists. On the one hand, she has come close to threatening to resign unless the UPA complies, while on the other she has sought to offer her party’s support for the Congress presidential candidate in ‘exchange’ for a debt relief package.

More recently, she has suggested that she will support the central government’s initiative of inviting FDI in civil aviation if the latter completes the modernisation of the Kolkata airport before the puja season in October. She has successfully scuttled the Teesta water sharing treaty because she sees it as damaging for a section of the Bengali farmers. And like her predecessors, she has used her control of the railway ministry to shower projects on her home state on a large scale. In this regard, she resembles other strong regional political leaders, who use their relations with Delhi to influence the flow of resources from the centre to the states in their favour. This kind of maneuvering does not go down well among political commentators and observers concerned with ‘the greater good of the nation’; but there is ample reason to believe that many Bengali voters would beg to differ.

Is the honeymoon over?
Mamata Banerjee has carried her confrontational and divisive style with her into Writers’ Building. This has meant that her mode of governing has been influenced by the same oppositional – some call it authoritarian – modus operandi she developed during her struggle with the Marxists. The number of ‘controversies’ this has landed her in during her first 400 days in power is too long to list here. It includes banning certain newspapers from public libraries; meddling with the contents of school books; jailing a professor people over a cartoon; making derogatory comments against a rape victim; ignoring reports of farmers’ suicides; a controversial eviction drive in Nonadanga; and generally dismissing all kinds of criticism as ‘conspiracies’, to name but a few. The said farmers’ suicides have, in combination with reports about an increase in evictions of sharecroppers and high levels of political violence, led to speculations about a looming rural crisis in the state.

Her way of running the state has also alienated a large section of the intelligentsia that had supported her during and after the movements in Singur and Nandigram. Frustrated with the Left, many among the intelligentsia had banked on a seemingly transformed Mamata Banerjee to introduce a more open, democratic and less oppressive regime. Their support for Mamata Banerjee was in all likelihood based on hope rather than any deep, personal conviction, and today many among the intelligentsia find themselves bitterly disappointed. Kabir Suman, who was elected to the Lok Sabha on a TMC ticket three years ago, has, for instance, long since fallen out with the party, which he has accused of being corrupt. Magsaysay awardee Mahasweta Devi has likened the TMC government to a fascist regime, while social activists like Anuradha Talwar have used words like “anarchic” and “chaotic” to characterise the TMC.

Mamata Banerjee’s honeymoon with this particular section of the Bengali electorate does indeed seem to be coming to an end, not least because these intellectuals in many ways expected the unrealistic, namely, a swift and fundamental transformation of the basic political culture of the state.

The amount of “bad press” the TMC has received over the past weeks and months has been considerable, and if this were any indication of the general mood in the state, one would surely be led to believe that Mamata’s honeymoon with the electorate was over. But this would in all likelihood be a premature conclusion for a number of reasons. First of all, it is not evident that the ability of the intelligentsia to influence public opinion extends much beyond Kolkata and other urban areas. Politics in rural Bengal operates according to a different logic where the ability of political parties to act as mediators and providers of goods, services, connections and ‘development’ are important. Sociologist Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya has described rural Bengal as a ‘party society’, a society where political parties dominate the socio-political sphere to the extent that other competing channels of public transaction are either weak or non-existent.

For many years the CPM’s ability to manage, and act as the centre of gravity for, party society kept it in power. Now, the TMC seems to have increasingly been successful in displacing the CPM within this structure of rural dominance. This has been achieved through means both fair and fowl, by eliminating or neutralising opponents while awarding supporters and loyalists. Reports from several places in rural Bengal about erstwhile supporters of both the Congress and the CPM defecting to join the TMC testify to the latter’s newfound role as the hub of rural political life. To the extent that the TMC manages to entrench itself in this rural power structure, the evolving hostile mood among the urban middle and upper classes and the intelligentsia may have little impact on the overall political trajectory of the state.

The principle of one-man-one-vote underlies every Indian election, and in Bengal rural voters far outnumber their urban counterparts. And presently Mamata Banerjee and the TMC appear confident of their own strength. The party leader’s mass appeal remains intact, and the TMC’s good performance at a number of recent municipal elections prompted railway minister Mukul Roy to declare that the result proved that “Trinamool has enough strength to rule Bengal and to fight the next election alone”, should relations with the Congress sour further. There have similarly been speculations about the TMC preponing the panchayat elections, scheduled for 2012, to later this year in order to reap the dividends of its present strength.

Much will of course depend on the ability of the CPM to bounce back from its first significant electoral defeat since 1977. The CPM does not appear to have so far recovered much of the lost ground, but if and when they do, West Bengal may move towards a more ‘normal’ North Indian political pattern of competitive electoral politics and alternating governments, with some level of political unrest. And for better or worse, Mamata Banerjee is sure to play a key role in the future politics of West Bengal.