At every parar adda of garrulous Kolkata,by now the tireless talk since May 16 punctuated by wisecracks untranslatable from the native idiom must have hit upon the lazy joke: Whats common to Dada and Didi? Answer: They come back from the dead. Well,Sourav Ganguly and Mamata Banerjee may not exactly have each other in mind at the moment,but in 2004 (after the Trinamool Congress was reduced to Mamata as its lone MP) and again in 2006 (after its decimation in assembly elections) nobody gave her a chance in state,let alone national,politics. Yet,she remained the Lefts most tenacious opponent. That tenacity has now paid off. Saturdays reversal of fortune was,statistically and electorally,Banerjees comeback moment. But her return to the centrestage of Bengal politics began soon after the 2006 debacle on what has since been a well-documented,sentimentally or intellectually praised,rationally or brutally chastised,trajectory. There was much argument and much good on both sides of the war. And much more that typified the entrenched ills of Bengal politics. Often,through that saga of blood and gore,guns and goons,near-month-long fasts,mammoth rallies,the bystander might have found it difficult to tell who was uglier than the other. But the people of Bengal,in the thick of things for three decades,must have thought they knew throughout. Now,theyve spoken. At her moment of near-epic triumph and vindication,Banerjee must remember that she cannot blow her chance again. The grand emotion will subside tomorrow,and itll be back-to-business the day after. What India and Bengal await is the level-headed,mature half of Mamata,not the mercurial,street-activist one. While shes still in opposition in the state,shes in government at the Centre. She must remember that its been a long march from her days in the Congress rank and file in the 70s.
