Mamata Banerjee Has Set An Extremely Dangerous Precedent And We Need To Talk About It

After the Supreme Court ordered the embattled police commissioner of Kolkata to appear before Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), the Mamata Banerjee versus Centre stand-off seems to have been over with both sides claiming victory. The most interesting developments out of this episode, however, are happening around the edges of the main event, and this piece wishes to bring focus on those important developments.

The Congress party, whose senior leaders including Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi, had vociferously attacked Mamata Banerjee during the assembly campaign in 2016 over the chit-fund scandal, did a complete u turn, as Rahul Gandhi called Mamata Banerjee to assure her of his party’s support in this stand-off.

With this, it is safe to say that Congress and Rahul Gandhi have resigned to playing second fiddle to Mamata Banerjee in the 2019 campaign. After its assembly wins failed to impress anyone except the ‘darbari’ journalists, Congress seems to have recalibrated their goals from winning in 2019, to merely keeping BJP out. Until now, they have ceded ground to Samajwadi Party (SP)-Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in Uttar Pradesh in spite of being snubbed in their alliance, have reportedly agreed to contest fewer seats compared to Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) in Bihar, and with this latest bonhomie with Mamata Banerjee, Rahul has signalled an end to his prime ministerial aspirations for 2019. With his sister Priyanka Gandhi’s entry into active politics being viewed as a no-confidence motion on his performance by his own party, Rahul Gandhi’s political emasculation has continued with this.

The most worrying trend of this incident, however, is the unprecedented use of state law and order machinery by Mamata Banerjee to arrest CBI officers as well as continuously creating roadblocks for visiting BJP leaders. While many BJP supporters see this as a sign of the CM feeling threatened by BJP’s surge in the state, the precedent that Mamata Banerjee’s brazen usage of power, and the craven surrender by senior police officials who join her in dharna to save democracy, have set, have serious implications for Indian democracy.

There is also no doubt that the increasing clout wielded by irresponsible regional parties is also indicative of Congress’s failure to build a nationwide constructive opposition, something that the BJP tried gamely while they were out of power. Rahul Gandhi’s personal aspirations for the top post, his personal animus against Modi and Congress party’s blind spot for the dynasty, have conspired to make “Modi hatao” as the number one goal for the party, rather than taking back the power, which should have been a more logical goal, given a political party’s dharma.

This in turn meant that instead of building cadres in each state, the party is increasingly seeking the path of least resistance, namely putting their power (mainly their loyalists in mainstream media) behind whoever is BJP’s principal opponent in a given state. By doing this, Congress has not only thrown their own state cadres under the bus and allowed BJP to move to the number two spot in states where traditionally they were not strong, the party has also allowed megalomaniacal regional leaders like Mamata Banerjee to amass alarming amount of power which one day can threaten the very fabric of our nation.

While the neutral observers have been somewhat divided about the political benefits to TMC as well as BJP out of this showdown, one can’t help but think that the same opposition parties who hastened to support Mamata Banerjee publicly, will be at least a little bit wary about her using this as a launchpad for her national ambitions.

First of all, Mamata Banerjee’s online supporters have been some of the most regionalist and linguistic bigots on social media, and many of them, in an attempt to bring down leaders like Amit Shah and Yogi Adityanath, have targeted the North Indian people as a demographic.

Mulayam Singh Yadav or Mayawati who needs to go to the same demographic to derive their power, would be certainly wary of any overt alignment with the most divisive party in today’s discourse. With hardly any time left for the general elections, one must wonder if Mamata and TMC have done enough to stake claim to be the first among equals status in any mahagatbandhan.

Finally, many relatively neutral voters watching this drama will surely be asking if they wish to live in a country where the CM of each state has absolute power over the lives of the citizens of that state. Mamata Banerjee’s demonstration of muscle poses some scary questions about the nature of state rights. If the police turns a whip in the hand of their political masters, and the masters have power to stop the Centre from intervening, where will you go if the state turns rogue?

What would happen when many regional satraps like Mamata Banerjee join hands to form a coalition government at Centre, with no common agenda, except perhaps a tacit agreement to not interfere in each other’s territory, like the mafia dons in the early 20th century America? What will happen, if as part of this power bargaining, tomorrow Delhi police are brought under the local government, and if that government decides to stop the Prime Minister from landing in Delhi?

The indiscriminate use of institution’s power by the Centre is a real concern and it is frequently discussed in political discourse, but the states turning into fiefdoms of regional leaders and the resultant Balkanisation of India is an equally real threat, and any future discussion of the Centre-state division of power must give serious consideration to this threat too.