Once again, there are headlines about Mamata Banerjee. And, as always, the headlines are about her objecting to something, and demanding that it be scrapped. Mamata is often in the headlines, and usually for declaring that she fully intends to throw herself and all the resources that West Bengal’s second-largest party can command between some proposed policy and its execution, something that all too often involves throwing herself and a significant number of fellow members of West Bengal’s second-largest party between a train and its destination. Most of us would struggle to remember an occasion when she proudly announced a new direction for policy, or even articulated clearly an alternate vision for Bengal’s future.

And yet Mamata goes on and on, monopolising opposition to the Left Front and, in election after election, ensuring that a good number of votes get cast for the longest-running Communist government in the history of democracies. What is the reason for this extraordinary longevity?

In south Calcutta, where I grew up and where Mamata lives in a famously nondescript house with a red tile roof, it is because she is considered authentic. Other states might choose politicians as a vehicle for ethnic aspirations and take pride in their very conspicuous consumption; it appears that for many Calcuttans Mamata’s very earthiness is enough — especially, perhaps, given that the Bengal CPM has always had more than enough members of the upper crust running things. That she is viewed as “one of us” is not surprising. She did not inherit power, she earned it, working her way up from primary membership of the Congress in the tumultuous ’70s. Today, she wears plain, cheap cotton saris; when she writes poetry — as she did, locking herself in her room for days after the debacle that was last general election — she is fairly definitely going for emotional effect rather than literary quality. (On old foe Somnath Chatterjee’s election as speaker: “Somnath speaker/ Congress sticker/ they are all together/ is it a get-together?” Fairly unlike that other poet, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, in both sentiment and style.)

... contd.