Putting The Support For Mamata Banerjee In A Moral Perspective

The Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress government in West Bengal is, today, a wretched morality play in utter tatters. The appalling incident of 9 August, when a post-graduate trainee doctor at Kolkata’s R G Kar Medical College Hospital was raped and murdered, has exposed the nature of her regime. She has to go, but the truth is that she won’t.

She really ought to go, but why should she, if the usual suspects in mainstream media, Khan Market circles, and that intelligentsia, are busy spinning the breakdown of law and order in her state as anything but that?

And why would the usual suspects act any differently, because, to them (and their infinite, existential horror), the likes of Banerjee are all that stand between democracy and a dreaded saffron Armageddon. So, as long as she can take on the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), trounce them repeatedly, and show that it can be done to other like-minded souls, calling out her mistakes is the last thing they can afford to do.

Imagine having to live with the anguish of irrelevance solely because you – oh, heaven forbid – wrote a stinging editorial in prose worthy of Tagore, which struck a chord, went viral, and brought down an apathetic government.

Worse, imagine having to suffer the guilt of everyone you know having to suffer saffron everywhere because of what you did in a rare fit of incensed morality. Imagine having to spend the rest of your now-immaterial life consoling those in your circles who were ‘shivering for five full minutes’ because someone said something saffron to them.

Worse still, imagine having to live with the penury. No more handsome handouts. No more sumptuous sinecures. No more access. No income. The reason being that, after all, the sound of rice bowls being broken is absolutely the worst nightmare of a Left Liberal, since, without a patron, without sponsors, they are what everyone else knows they actually are – capons.

At some level, though, this posturing by the prebends of Park Street or Pandara Park, is also actually an extremely savvy judgment call, politically, that is. Why rock the boat, or worse, alienate her, or worse still, earn her ire, because, if Banerjee can keep her vote banks intact through this crisis, then it is only a question of tiding things over until the issue is sadly forgotten.

Past history indicates that Mamata Banerjee has survived this and more solely because of that remarkable secular ability to insulate her prized electorate from criticism of her. It is a fairly simple mechanism where by any such criticism is weighed in the balance of identity against the oppressive weight of alarmist victimhood. No prizes for guessing which way the scales tilt – every time. 

Also, now that the case has gone to the Central Bureau of Investigation, what is everyone still pointing fingers at ‘us’? If so, it would not be a surreal Alice-in-Wonderland situation if someone in those circles complains of harassment soon.

There is also a practical aspect to such immoral posturing by self-professed moralists who can’t complete a lecture without quoting Plato or Aristotle: they know, as well as us, that if it is breaking news, then it will be forgotten soon. That is the tragedy of the white-noise driven digital age we live in.

And if we choose to remember, there is little that can be done, short of imposing President’s Rule, because of the insularity of that votebank. Either way, it is back to square one.

Mamata Banerjee lost the moral right to rule a long time ago. Those who continue to support her blindly, and absolve her of her sins, solely because she keeps ‘The Saffron Menace’ at bay, would do well to note that while she may yet survive this crisis, their reputations won’t. And if they are okay with that, then there is little else left to be said.