How Bengal Will Cheer Banerjee To Self-Destruction

Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee was at her acerbic worst on Monday, calling Prime Minister Narendra Modi names, taunting him and taking the impossible vow of removing Modi not only from the Prime Minister’s chair, but also from politics! She was wildly cheered at the public rally in Kolkata she addressed to vent her ire over demonetisation when she spewed fire at Modi in language that can, at best, be labelled intemperate. Today’s (29 November) newspapers, especially the Bengali ones, were full of wholesome praise for her.

No other chief minister of the country speaks in a language that Banerjee does. No chief minister abuses, insults, taunts, threatens and defies a prime minister (not only Modi, but also Manmohan Singh before him) in the ignoble fashion that Banerjee does. She is always fire and brimstone, rarely has anyone seen her smile in public. In quixotic style, she is always tilting at the windmills and has made a (political) career out of crossing swords with the government of the day in New Delhi.

Banerjee does all this because it yields her rich political dividends in Bengal. Her electorate likes the prime minister-bashing that she indulges in. They love her playing the underdog taking on powerful persons and the establishment. Bengal’s masses applaud her for speaking their coarse language and being perpetually in the ‘fight’ mode.

That is because they are, all said and done, as intemperate in their language, as coarse in their habits and suffering from the same sense of being subjugated and wronged as Banerjee. This is not to say that all Bengalis are like that; it is the people who remain in Bengal who are. And there is a reason for this. The best and brightest of Bengal never remain in Bengal: they migrate to other states and out of the country in search of better opportunities. Even the mediocre leave Bengal. As so do the hard-working, the enterprising and the industrious lot.

So it is the below-average, the slothful and the incompetent who largely populate Bengal today. And as sociologists say, this section of people are always complaining, ready to blame others for their failings, lack of industriousness and enterprise, and for their miseries, which are largely of their own making. Add to this the decades of being schooled in communist ideology that abhors wealth, wealth-creation, and enterprise, and what you have is a large mass of people who not only don’t have the calibre and the willingness to improve their lot, but also who celebrate poverty and blame others – the well-off, the talented and the enterprising lot – for their sufferings.

Fighting comes naturally to Bengal’s masses today, because their daily life is a fight for the small loaves that come their way. Banerjee has grown up and still lives in that milieu – a slum in south Kolkata, where ugly fights replete with expletives and curses break out over even minor matters like breaking a queue for collecting the trickle of water that spews from the Kolkata Municipal Corporation’s public taps. Fighting, and using coarse language while doing so, thus comes naturally to her.

It would be safe to say that few, if any, of the people she has grown up and lives amongst, have put in even an iota of hard work in academics or later on in life. The only enterprise in life they would have ever engaged in would be to set up an illegal stall selling fritters on a pavement. Many of them are members of ‘supply syndicates’ that have held the real estate sector in Bengal to ransom. They are all poor, or, at best, lower middle class. Banerjee revels staying among them and being one of them.

This is, again, not to say that successful politicians in India, and the rest of the world, have not come up from poor families. Many have, but they have been wise and taken their people and states forward. They have extolled the virtues of wealth creation and have been visionaries. Narendra Damodardas Modi is a prime example. In fact, Modi hails from a family that would have been poorer than Banerjee’s – his father used to run a tea stall at a railway station, while Banerjee’s father was considerably better off as a petty trader. But Modi rose from poverty to make Gujarat one of the richest states in India. Banerjee has risen from poverty to make Bengal poorer than what it was under the regressive communists.

Bengal’s masses have also been told by ruling politicians of the state for decades that New Delhi is responsible for all the ills afflicting Bengal. They have been fed and nurtured on an anti-New Delhi diet. Thus, when Banerjee rails and rants against Modi, she strikes an instant chord among Bengal’s masses.

Another characteristic of Bengal’s masses is that they are an angry lot. Perpetually angry. This anger is easily encountered in the metalled streets of Kolkata and in the kutcha lanes of the villages. National Crime Records Bureau statistics show, as this report illustrates, that West Bengal is one of the most violent states in the country. Along with Kerala, West Bengal tops the list of politically violent states (but this is a legacy of the Left that Banerjee has simply followed in Bengal).

Banerjee, thus, is also perpetually angry. Her anger feeds on itself. The more she challenges, sets deadlines and issues warnings (to New Delhi) and the more they are ignored, the angrier and more frustrated she becomes. Take the case of the three-day deadline she set (along with Kejriwal) on 17 November for Modi to roll back demonetisation. November 20 came and went, without anyone, least of all Modi, even batting an eyelid. That obviously made Banerjee very angry – angry enough to vow to remove Modi from politics. That self-vow will, surely, never be fulfilled. And that will make her angrier and issue harsher warnings and threats. Only to be ignored and mocked even more in the rest of the country. But Bengal will, no doubt, continue to cheer her to self-destruction.