Mamata Banerjee: In the Eyes of a Newspaper Editor

Dr. Keshab Chandra Mandal

E-Mail: mandalkeshab2013@gmail.com

While Mamata Banerjee was campaigning before the Assembly elections in West Bengal in 2011, Sagarika Ghosh, deputy editor of CNN-IBN, observed her movements very closely; her way of living; style of campaigning and the issues she dealt with. What she observed and felt about the then railway minister and chief campaigner of the Trinamool Congress Party, she wrote in The Telegraph (published on 5^th May, 2011), which is being reproduced here. She wrote that, “For Mamata, the personal is political. In my years of travelling with politicians, I’ve discovered the one quality that separates a natural politician from an artificial one. And that one quality is a complete absence of a sense of privacy. Fussy city-bred types shut their doors and retreat into paranoid self-involved spaces. For the natural politician, the private and the public merge completely. Lalu Prasad used to keep his bedroom and bathroom doors always open. Mamata eats, sleeps, works, lives, falls ill among people. She rarely closes any doors. She’s won a big victory but her family members say she likes the small things. When asked by the correspondent to Mamata Banerjee’s sister in law (Lata Boudi) whether she would leave the present house, Lata Boudi quipped that, “move to a bungalow? Proshnoyee othey naa (question does not arise). She’d never live in a big house, or drive a big car.” Bigness seems to offend her lively sense of aesthetics. Her personal bag is a chic little pouch made of blue denim. She has a tiny Ma Kali (Goddess) in her car. Green and orange paper buntings decorate her bonnet designed to match with her tiny hedge of bamboo and rubber plants. She asked all the Bengalees to light a small lamp outside their homes after the election victory to signal the end of violence. To fight a big fight, solace must perhaps come from the little things; from the little pretty things that remind of a little girl’s imagined universe, away from the harsh realities of fighting in the anti-communist atmosphere.

She is India’s Lech Walesa, a home grown anti-Communist here, yet ironically her self-image is that of a Leftist. A true Leftist, she says, like the once dedicated activists intellectuals of yore who sacrificed personal comforts to serve. Nationalist Pritilata Waddedar and communist leader Kalpana Joshi are some of her heroines. She may not have the conventional attributes of a bhadramahila. Her father was too poor to send her abroad for a prized western degree. Instead, Mamata Banerjee to me represents the rise of a homegrown Bengali ebullience, the happy-go-lucky democratic spirit of the street side adda with their mastaans and mashimas. Bengal’s democratic revolution has arrived with a bang and it’s arrived after years of bloody struggle. But away from the images of Mamata the ferocious warrior politician, my Mamata will always be about folksy feminine Bengali; about tiny Ma Kalis; about neat denim bags and stories about sheyaals who shout hukka hua at night; and about Tagore’s poem about Bhunag Rajar Rani, the valiant queen of Ketoon who dressed as a man to outwit her enemy.”