Is Kolkata’s New White-and-Blue Avatar Meant to Mask Its Decline?

How Mamata Banerjee’s Kolkata beautification project is a big sham.

Five summers ago, days before West Bengal went to vote in 2011 (an election that would ultimately throw out the Left Front regime), Mamata Banerjee painted like there was no tomorrow.

In her humble Kalighat abode in south Kolkata, Mamata would feverishly churn out curious and strange figures on canvas of different shapes and sizes – and price. Some would be distributed free of cost to visiting Delhi journalists, while others were reserved for Kolkata’s money bags, among them Sudipto Sen, the proprietor of the Saradha Group, who paid Rs 2 crore for a dash of blue and white – the Trinamool Congress’ colours – that were passed off as “original artwork”.

Mamata Banerjee and Her ‘Art’ Business

Two other paintings – of indeterminate form and meaning, besides aesthetics – went for Rs 3.86 crore. But the money ultimately was routed back to the TMC through a fictitious company, Trinetra, whose books showed it had a paid-up capital of only Rs 20,000.

“A company with such a low paid-up capital bought two paintings worth Rs 3.86 crore,” reminded Deepak Ghosh, formerly a two-time TMC legislator and now a passionate crusader against Mamata, who has renewed his attack against the TMC supremo.

Once Mamata’s closest and most trusted party colleague, Ghosh, who retired in the mid-90s as a secretary to the West Bengal government, has written a series of books and monograms over the past five years to “expose the fraud that she represents.”

This time, as Bengal crawls into an excruciating six-phase assembly election, Ghosh chuckles over how Mamata took to painting.

After the TMC was wiped out in the 2004 Lok Sabha elections when the party aligned itself with the AB Vajpayee-led BJP, she would brood and often tell me she would like to paint to overcome solitude.

Deepak Ghosh, Former two-time TMC legislator and now a passionate crusader against Mamata

Painting the Town Blue and White

So Mamata took to paint and brush and the “material for her time-pass would be funded by sundry party hacks, which was their way of ingratiating themselves to her,” Ghosh said. But as the 2011 elections advanced, she went into top gear with her paint brush and canvas. Her weakness was white and blue.

So, one of the first things that she did after storming Writers’ Building in the summer of 2011 was to rid Kolkata of the hated red, the CPI(M)’s colour. Mamata’s plan was not just to paint the City of Joy in her party’s white-and-blue but light up Kolkata’s roads and streets in the same colours.

A former Kolkata Municipal Corporation councillor, who belonged to the CPI(M), said cracking up in laughter: “After painting the city’s wall, underpasses, railings, government buildings and even flyovers white-and-blue, Didi turned her attention to turning Kolkata into London.”

Lamps of Joy

The first – and subsequent – orders for thousands of trident lamps that would light up Kolkata went to a small firm owned by her upstart nephew Abhishek Banerjee (who would later become an MP). Abhishek’s firm – and there was no call for tender – won the bid hands down. The cost incurred – a whopping Rs 30 crore – was a travesty for a cash-strapped state whose debt stood at over Rs 2 lakh crore when Mamata assumed power.

Kolkata, of course, did not turn into London. And the ugly trident lamps, which come alive before sunset, are now an eyesore. To add to the ocular offence, the aluminium stem that holds up of the dim lamps is wound up with a serpentine double helix of blue and white fairy lights.

“Kolkata has lost much. It is in a state of moral and political decline, but the trident lamps are a cruel reminder of how the social and economic darkness is being sought to be buried by the glow of white-and-blue,” said Gopa Barman, who retired years ago as a teacher in Kolkata’s reputed South Point School.