The Banerjee Belligerence Brings No Benefits To Bengal

Like many other exercises undertaken by Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, this too was doomed to fail. And it did. The reference here is to her mission to leverage political opposition to demonetisation and cobble an alliance of disparate forces to take on the BJP in general, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in particular.

Ever since the evening of 8 November (when the demonetisation was announced), Banerjee has been shouting herself hoarse. She reckoned, mistakenly as it now turns out, that the obvious inconvenience faced by millions across the country queueing up to exchange their old Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes, or depositing and withdrawing cash from their accounts, could be tapped and provoked into building up a groundswell of opposition to Modi.

Banerjee also reckoned that she would be able to get all non-NDA political parties opposed to the BJP (with the exception of the Left for which she has little love lost) together to launch a concerted, countrywide agitation against demonetization, and that such an agitation would lay the groundwork for the eventual formation of a ‘Third Front’ which would take on the BJP in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.

With such grandiose plans in mind, Banerjee travelled twice (presumably at taxpayers’ expense) to New Delhi. She met MPs and leaders from many parties, but when it came to marching with her from Parliament to Rashtrapati Bhawan to tell a bemused Pranab Mukherjee how commoners were suffering due to demonetisation, she had mainly her own docile parliamentarians for company. No leader worth the name, save for the out of work Omar Abdullah, joined her.

She then staged a dharna at Jantar Mantar, but this too was given a miss by leaders of other parties. Her self-declared objective of getting Arvind Kejriwal, Mayawati, Mulayam, Nitish Kumar, Naveen Patnaik and other senior non-NDA politicians together for at least a photo-op at Jantar Mantar lay miserably unfulfilled.

Banerjee and Arvind Kejriwal set a three-day deadline for Modi to roll back his demonetisation decision on 17 November. Both threatened countrywide stirs and even a rebellion if Modi did not oblige them. The deadline came and went, and no one even blinked. As for Banerjee’s ‘Third Front’ dream, it was a non-starter.

Her earlier attempts on this front had also come a cropper. Banerjee has, for long, been trying to catalyse an amalgamation of non-Congress and non-BJP forces (though, at present, she is not averse to the Congress also being a part of that chimeral formation), but without an iota of success. She had been led up the garden path in the past by Jayalalithaa, Mulayam and many others, only to be ingloriously ditched by them. But Banerjee has persevered in her quixotic fashion, not learning any lessons from the past.

Banerjee needs to acknowledge a few basic facts. And the most important among them is that despite being the undisputed leader of Bengal, she just does not have what it takes to make it big at the national level. She has had her opportunities (as Union minister in the Vajpayee and UPA regimes holding important portfolios like rail and coal), but she messed those up due to her whimsical and mercurial nature. She is not viewed as a mature leader with a vision by people outside Bengal.

Banerjee also needs to realise that there is no way the ‘Third Front’ can become a reality, not at least in the foreseeable future. And even if that were to happen, the experiment would be a very short-lived one, given the inherent contradictions within such a formation. There is no way, for instance, that Mayawati and Mulayam would join hands. Or Jayalalithaa and Karunanidhi would even dream of sharing a stage. Or Nitish and Laloo, sacrifice their own ambitions (of becoming the prime minister), for the sake of such an alliance. Beset by oversized egos, conflicting agendas and petty rivalries, any ‘Third Front’ experiment is bound to be a failure, and Banerjee would do well to realise this.

Weighed down by her failures, an angry and frustrated Banerjee has now returned to Bengal to vent her fury. On her express instructions, her partymen have started holding rallies, demonstrations and other programmes that have acted as major disruptions. Kolkata and other towns and townships across Bengal are having to bear the brunt of the Trinamool’s protests over demonetisation. The suffering masses of the state will be held to ransom this weekend by similar programmes.

On Monday (28 November), Banerjee herself will hit the already-clogged streets of Kolkata - and her minions across the state will follow suit in their own fiefs - to bring life to a standstill for millions of harried Kolkatans. Her observance of ‘Aakrosh Divas’ will make no difference to Modi, but will severely inconvenience millions of people across Bengal.

Banerjee herself harbours no hope for any rollback of demonetisation. She should be well aware by now that Modi, as Finance Minister Arun Jaitley firmly pointed out, is no rollback Prime Minister (unlike his predecessor). Her protests have failed to make any impact outside the borders of Bengal. Her mission to get prominent politicians from other states to launch a joint movement against demonetisation has failed miserably. Her ‘Third Front’ enterprise can bear no fruition, and her overarching ambition of becoming the prime minister of India can only remain a pipe dream.

Given all this, why then does Banerjee inflict more sufferings on the people of Bengal by launching protests against demonetisation that will have zero effect? Who outside Bengal will feel the effects of such protests and what will they count for anyway? Will anyone in the rest of India be bothered about, or impressed with, the mega rally that the mercurial chief minister of a backward state leads on Monday? Not at all, and the only explanation then for Banerjee’s actions now is that this indignant and embittered (over the failure of her Delhi mission) lady is cutting Bengal’s nose to spite its face.