Most importantly, however, there are lessons that India’s entire political class needs to take away. And those are lessons about irresponsibility and short-sightedness. The time when striking populist poses for notional short-term gain could be considered a useful strategy, if it ever existed, is definitely over. Mamata Banerjee believed she was on to a good thing: she could, she thought, revive her Trinamul Congress by hitching her political star to the fate of those in rural Bengal not directly benefited by the Left’s successive waves of land reform and, now, attempts at industrialisation. The strategy might not be problematic: her execution was deeply flawed. By creating a force which was, from the start, deeply obstructionist, she painted herself into a corner — a corner from which there was no escape without a massive loss of face.

The political class needs to step back and realise that the “mass movements” they launch over everything are not mass movements at all.

They are intended as carefully coordinated political campaigns; but, given that they are supposedly “people-driven”, they are prone to capture by extremists, and they all-too-easily explode out of the original initiator’s control. The BJP, which threatened a nationwide agitation over Amarnath and the Ram Setu, should remember this.

Orissa’s and Karnataka’s recent law-and-order troubles stand as testament to the human and political cost when such agitations are launched, and then are lost control of. Big political decisions are meant to be made politically, rationally, through negotiation and taking the long view — not through the last resort against an undemocratic state, civil agitation. India’s political class must learn from Banerjee how not to behave.