While plenty of variables are required to hook up with one another and go bust all together to set a political disaster in motion, almost none of these variables apply to West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee.

• Machiavellian calculation: Doesn’t apply
• Simple arithmetic: Doesn’t apply
• Momentary failure of commonsense: Doesn’t apply
• Commonsense: Doesn’t apply
• Cost-benefit analysis: Doesn’t apply
• Analysis: Doesn’t apply
• Failure of farsightedness: Doesn’t apply
• Farsightedness: Doesn’t apply
• Thinking about 25 moves ahead: Doesn’t apply
• Thinking about moves: Doesn’t apply
• Balancing ambition and appetite: Doesn’t apply
• Balancing: Doesn’t apply
• Balancing necessity and need: Doesn’t apply
• Balance: Doesn’t apply
• Taking honest advice: Doesn’t apply
• Taking dishonest advice: Doesn’t apply
• Taking advice: Doesn’t apply
• Learning from experience: Doesn’t apply
• Learning: Doesn’t apply
• The more you put your mind to it, the longer the list gets. There are a few things that do apply, though:
• Brinkmanship: Applies
• Falling over the edge: Applies
• Falling over the edge again: Applies
• And again: Applies

But all things considered, it might still be pushing it a bit to predict that on November 22, Mamata Banerjee’s first — and maybe only — chief ministership began the countdown to being checkmated when her near-unilateral no-confidence motion against the Congress-led UPA-II sank within seconds of the Trinamool moving it in the Lok Sabha. But it will not be pushing it to predict that she will give this frénésie du jour another shot. And another — until, as happened with her presidential election misadventure five months ago, the finality of failure becomes inescapable.

Only, this time, the November 22 train wreck in New Delhi dovetailed with a November 21 train wreck in West Bengal. And that was a state cabinet reshuffle, Banerjee’s third in 18 months of being chief minister, and by far the direst. The reshuffle — which brought in eight new faces (including two who were Congress legislators until a day before they were inducted), dislodged eight, and left a minister of state unemployed and a raft of Mamata’s trusted lieutenants bristling with a sense of reward and regard misappropriated from them and handed to the undeserving — is hardly remarkable, as reshuffles go; but it could go down in state history as the beginning of an anti-Mamata revolt. (This event, though, might have a tough time topping the occasion of 18 of sheepish Banerjee’s Braves planning on ramming through a central government-toppling motion when she needed 50.)

The revolt might be brief, and she might succeed, at first, in smothering it with her trademark harangues (a verbal avalanche of self-entitlement being her most successful diversionary tactic); but the Left Front and the state Congress (and, going by a thin inflow of info, the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha in the hill subdivision of Darjeeling, the Siliguri Terai and the Dooars) smelt enough blood to think it prudent to take the leashes off their individual strategies to co-opt the Trinamool base during the panchayat elections early next year.

(These elections, too, could turn out to be a bummer for Banerjee: A little more than a month ago, on September 28, her government had asked the state election commission to advance the panchayat elections from May 2013 to January 2013. The only logic behind this that makes any sense is that she probably hoped to cut off tens of thousands new voters, all young and many awake to the reality of Trinamool’s disastrous inexperience in governance. The way it might have looked from her perch in Writers’ Building, these hotbloods could skew the numbers if the election commission’s plan to update the voters’ list through a drive from October 1, 2012 to January 15, 2013 wasn’t pre-empted by early elections. For months now, concentrating on survival — and maybe topping up its war chest with small cash from this fund, that plan — the Trinamool hasn’t made the effort to muster up the tiniest inclination to pull in new supporters on the cusp of adulthood. But this is logical reasoning, which is why this analysis might just be arrant nonsense. Whatever the case, given the party’s zoned-out behaviour in the second half of November, panchayat elections just a month from now might turn out to be tragic — for the Trinamool. The Left Front would have the elections tomorrow if they could.)

Reshuffle shows the future: grumblings under way in an autocratic party
At the very least, the badly-engineered reshuffle, a result of Banerjee’s tunnel-vision, Centre-focussed fixedness of vision, will open a hole in her fortifications which simple, loud in-party grousing about her unworkable policies and undeliverable promises could keep widening. This is not a future prospect: it’s begun.

Banerjee’s first and cardinal error was replanting her urbane septuagenarian minister Rabindranath Bhattacharya (whose career-long headmastership earned him the endearment ‘Mastermoshai’) for the second time — from the school education department in May 2011 to the agriculture department in mid-July 2011 to the department of programme implementation and statistics in November 2012. Bhattacharya was the erudite, genteel, reasonable face of Singur agitation that brought Mamata Banerjee to power; she couldn’t have done it without him.

When he received the merest pre-reshuffle hint of a summary shift to a department (stats) that he considers himself entirely unsuited for, he put in his papers; he avoided the 22 November swearing-in, waiting with extraordinary patience for an explanatory call from Banerjee. When she still hadn’t rung by the following day, he announced — continuing to extend to her the courtesy of time — that he wouldn’t take office for 15 days. On November 24, he had had enough: he told the media, ranged deep at his home in Shibarambati village in Singur, that he had resigned and would never return to politics. Bhattacharya couldn’t understand why it had been necessary to shift him to the PI&S department, which usually runs on autopilot. The scuttlebutt in Writers’ Building is that Banerjee had found his performance inadequate.

Nonetheless, a few hours after Bhattacharya unfussily opened up a schism in an autocratic party that a week ago seemed to have none, the other post-reshuffle grousers, hurting from nicked egos, let rip: Shyamal Mondal, who had thought himself safe from Banerjee’s caprices as a double-whammy minister of state — MoS (independent charge) for Sunderban affairs and MoS for irrigation and waterways — wasn’t relocated but shown the door; Rachhpal Singh, an extroverted former DIG and an emphatic Mamata-apostle, gaped at his Tourism portfolio being brusquely handed to a Congress floorcrosser, Krishnendu Narayan Choudhury, and replaced by the drab, research-oriented planning department; the professorial Rabiranjan Chatterjee, the giant-killer who had overpowered CPI(M) politburo member Nirupam Sen, lost one of his two portfolios — retaining the department of science and technology but inexplicably losing the department of technical education and training (to Ujjal Biswas, who already handles the department of food processing and industry) — and almost committed himself to surrendering the department left in his charge after slogging to make it “functional”. Even though his offer defeated the purpose of protest, it was entirely at home with the Mamata Banerjee-style defiance of logic.

Present writ in shorthand on blackboards: a quiet education revolution
There is nothing worse, in West Bengal, than the undeserved denigration of a teacher, especially of a beloved educator of young minds. Banerjee gave herself some insurance by inducting another Singur activist, Becharam Manna, as MoS for agriculture and child development, but Manna, a rough-hewn but moderately landed farmer, might be insufficient protection from the tidewaters of challenge that have begun to come in from schools and colleges across the state, many of whose boards have been ‘infiltrated’ by Trinamool activists who are dropouts who routinely, and often violently, besiege principals, deans and heads of departments with admission/attendance/unofficial exam reappraisal demands.

A quiet educational revolt has been brewing for months — riding the back of a teaching system that has become a Trinamool satrapy in 18 months that had taken the Left Front decades to build, reorganise, screw up, and mainstream; a Presidency University with “world standard” and “prestigious” little more than words of praise on paper, carrying Mamata Banerjee’s firm imprimatur; and a syllabus wide open to intervention by Banerjee, who announced on November 21, to much academic raillery, that she wants ‘performing arts’ (read Rabindra Sangeet and Rabindra Geetinatya) to be taught in all colleges and universities at both graduate and postgraduate levels.

Moreover, Manna has never had Bhattacharya’s pulling power, and had been incidental in May 2006 in keeping Mamata Banerjee’s 29-seat slump from collapse. It was mostly Bhattacharya who had kept her upright: he had the organisational skills, a teaching-enhanced grasp of history, soft-spokenness, and a headmaster’s sense of command. And he brought all this quiet moxie to bear on the agriculture department, which flourished under him. Two months ago, when Mamata Banerjee had an appraisal done of the functioning of every department, agriculture stood at third — as had Bhattacharya during a previous appraisal of all 33 cabinet ministers on December 12, 2011.

Suddenly, with 44 ministers as of November 22, eight of them greenhorns, Bhattacharya finds himself pronounced more or less inept. The Trinamool’s Achilles heel isn’t math — it’s elementary arithmetic.

Compounding the Trinamool’s problem is that Bhattacharya can’t be got at, or even intimidated. Despite the advantages of being represented by Manna (Bhattacharya was better than Manna, but Manna is better than no Manna), Singur was lost to Mamata Banerjee at the beginning of this year, when she made it clear to those who had surrendered their land to the Tatas that they couldn’t get it back, even though the Tatas had relocated — the law doesn’t allow it. Singur is today more or less an anti-Trinamool bastion, or at least a non-Trinamool one. And this is where Bhattacharya lives, sandbagged in and safeguarded by thousands of admirers sustained by the memory of how he once led and represented them.

Sometimes, all rebellion needs is one voice speaking out just once to set the ball rolling. And Bhattacharya’s is one voice that Banerjee — omnipresent, and nearly omnipotent, for Bengal’s roughest year-and-a-half since Jyoti Basu reinvented himself from Head Hood into Elder Statesman three decades ago — might find it impossible to prise out of the ears of her own party members. And of Bengal.