West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s remark against bandhs may be politically very incorrect for his comrades — but, factually, it couldn’t have been more accurate.

Ask Rodiya, the mother stranded at the Thiruvananthapuram railway station barely eight days ago when Left unions called a 24-hour hartal — not a bandh since bandhs were effectively banned by the Kerala High Court in 1997 — against the “economic policies of the Centre.”

Rodiya, from Kottayam, got the news that her five-year-old son had died. Roads being blocked, she rushed to the railway station where citing the “neoliberal” policies of the Centre, a group of comrades squatted on the tracks. Her tears were of little help. Kottayam is barely three hours away from Thiruvananthapuram but Rodiya reached her home only late evening and that, too, under police protection.

From the trauma of a mother who’s lost her child and can’t get home to countless others, unseen and unheard, who are forced to put everything on hold, Kerala is now the perpetual victim of the bandh-success story: this year alone, 75 hartals have paralysed districts and towns, six the entire state. From Saddam’s execution to the surge in oil prices, from even chikungunya to the death of a local leader — the cause hardly matters when a hartal itself is the rallying cause.

If a member of village panchayat is attacked by a rival party, the next day, that panchayat region shuts down. As highways pass through panchayats and municipalities, a hartal in a particular panchayat affects vehicular movement through that area. Result: long-distance vehicles stop at the border of the district and wait until the end of the agitation. Academic schedules are derailed, the Kerala Chamber of Commerce estimates a Rs 450-crore loss for each strike day, hospitals are forced to reschedule surgeries.

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