Crossing a line

In the midst of a national railway tragedy,the nation is witnessing the spectacle of a Union railway minister getting her script wrong. All over again. It has been obvious that Mamata Banerjee has her eyes focused on nothing but grabbing her holy grail: the Writers’ Building in Kolkata. To that end,she has stayed away from New Delhi,neglecting her key ministry — of late absorbed in Sunday’s civic polls,and ever since her Lok Sabha triumph last year,obsessed with the assembly election in 2011. As a result,almost everything Banerjee has said and done over the past year has been refracted through the prism of Bengal’s state polls. Thus she cannot say or do anything without hyphenating herself and her Trinamool Congress with her arch adversary,Bengal’s ruling Left Front. That is why,we — in the aftermath of the Jnaneswari outrage — must do with the absurdity of Banerjee’s irresponsible conspiracy theories,putting the blame on a “political conspiracy” hatched by her “enemies” to discredit her on the eve of the May 30 civic polls.

The Union home ministry has agreed to a CBI probe once,as per rules,the state government gives its formal approval. As per available evidence,the Maoists and/ or Maoist-trained operatives were responsible for the carnage. Nevertheless,since there’s a likely CBI probe,we can wait for the specifics of this case to be determined. The point to note is,all that matters less than ceasing to dither on Maoism. Mamata Banerjee,soft on Maoists and certainly on the Maoist-backed Peoples Committee Against Police Atrocities,is even now readier to mouth her fantastic allegations than take a long-awaited shot at the terrorists waging their bloody and cynical war on the Indian state. A senior Union cabinet minister cannot be seen to be sympathetic to the perpetrators of India’s worst internal security threat and place herself in the august company of blinkered civil society “spokespersons” who,perversely,are. But Banerjee has been silent on the possibility of Maoist involvement in this tragedy; nor has she had the decency to at least offer her resignation as Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel had after the Mangalore crash.

Where does this dangerous silliness stem from? Perhaps from the tendency of Bengal politics to wage battles over the bodies of the dead. Perhaps from the national political discourse that self-destructs in accommodating contrariness for the sake of contrariness. This newspaper urged last week that,to win this war,our politics must first heal its fractures on Maoism. It certainly cannot offer Mamata Banerjee leisure to scream a “political conspiracy” against her party.