Home > Banerjee off to a quick start in West Bengal

Banerjee off to a quick start in West Bengal

How effective the administration will be in the long term remains to be seen.

Posted on January 31, 2012, 12:22 PM

By Ivan Fernandez
Mumbai:

Bengalis, as much as they are Indians, have a thing with centuries. So when Mamata Banerjee and her Trinamool Congress completed a double century on December 5, there was as much jubilation for Didi’s first 200 days as chief minister of West Bengal as there might have been at the Eden Gardens cricket ground for the same number.

Much of Banerjee’s self-imposed 200-day agenda, if not solved, she definitely addressed within the first 100 days or earlier.

Calcutta and much of Bengal is now abuzz with this euphoria of something good happening, of an enthusiastic and charmingly honest woman hurrying to do something good for Bengal.

This is so similar to what Bengal experienced in 1977 when Jyoti Basu and his Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led coalition came to power, trouncing SS Ray’s fascist-style Congress government in the first post-Emergency election.

I had just entered middle school that time and can still remember those electrifying days, that feeling that we were free at last, that we had something to look forward to, a new messiah and a golden era that hopefully would last a thousand years.

Although just 200 days and counting into Banerjee’s tenure, I cannot but pray for history not to repeat itself. We know how easily the communists through more than 23 years of Basu and then Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, his successor for 10 years, uninterruptedly mismanaged Bengal, squandering many times over their goodwill and initial accomplishments.

Change became so inevitably pressing by the time the communists entered their 34th year that they were virtually wiped out in the assembly elections. Don’t get me wrong. My first vote ever was for Basu and the CPI (M) – out of conviction.

If Basu inherited a failed state, with its strikes and inefficiency, violence, rampant nepotism and corruption, Banerjee inherited a wrecked state, almost financially bankrupt and morally corrupt, where institutions – from police to industry, education and culture to panchayats – that should have been independent were politicized.

The similarities of greater or lesser proportions remain basically the same as when the two chief ministers assumed power. I don’t know how this new era will play out but I do know how the last one ended, becoming synonymous with atherosclerosis, inertia, dysfunction, arrogance and corruption. The chance for a peaceful egalitarian society was left like just so much pie in the sky.

Basu could have reworked Bengal. He had the political clout and mandate to do so. He could have created another Singapore, where the common person can at least live decently. We would have forgiven him or tolerated his nanny state controls if only for the common good. Unfortunately he never felt the need, allowing instead his Marxist liberators to become oppressors.

So I just hope that things will turn out differently for us in Bengal. Assuredly, there is more than hope. For one, the leadership, if not the party ideologies, are different.

If Basu was an icon largely invented by and for the Bengali masses, Banerjee is a people’s person, a busybody who makes it her raison d'�tre to champion peoples’ rights.

Basu came across as a bhadralok, an unruffled, refined gentleman in his starched and ironed, brand new white-colored dhoti and kurta; Banerjee, in her crumpled housemaid-type sari and just-out-of-bed disheveled hair, is a well-meaning firebrand in a tearing hurry. And lastly – no disrespect here – one is dead, the other very much in your face alive.

As Banerjee’s 200 days spill into 300, the enormity of the problems she has inherited I am sure has begun to dawn on her. But with the ferociousness of a Bengal tigress she has sunk her teeth into them. She is working herself to death with her “do it immediately” approach and close to 20 hours in office. She expects noting less from her team.

Her surprise visits to hospitals, police stations and government offices – Bengal’s most notoriously recalcitrant public welfare setups – has set the tone for her administration. Police will have to forgo their brown-shirt tactics perfected under the communist regime, government officials will have to be punctual and doctors will have to treat patients with a smile.

Her dictum that apathy towards the public will no longer be tolerated is becoming more than just an orientation course for things to come.

I hope that Banerjee understands that governing is not a cakewalk, that organizationally she heads a party where internal discipline is not as robust as the CPI (M) and where any imbalance in political compulsions and good governance will only lead to chaos.

But perhaps it is best said by the CPI (M) West Bengal State Committee on their website, phrases of which I have liberally culled.

“200 days are not sufficient time to evaluate the work of any State Government. The target-based campaign… of the work to be completed within 200 days of the new Government…does not indicate its willingness to fulfill them in near future...”

And who should know it better than them. They had at least 12,410 days to complete it and we know where that left us.

Ivan Fernandes is a writer and analyist based in Mumbai

Mamata Banerjee , West Bengal