Why Mamata Could Lose the Bhadralok Vote and Why it Won’t Matter

Bhadralok is no more convinced of Didi and her promise of ‘poribarton’ in Bengal, writes Shuma Raha.

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee participates in an election rally in Nadia district of West Bengal, on 9 April 2016. (Photo: PTI)

On a recent visit to Kolkata a strange sight greeted my eyes. The famous trident lamps lining the city’s streets have now been entwined with blue and white fairy lights. This wasn’t for some local Puja, to be dismantled once the deity had departed. The dim trident lamps (their procurement by the Trinamool Congress-led Kolkata Municipal Corporation was mired in controversy) have been strung up with these lurid lights ostensibly to endow the city with a perma-festive look.

In reality, however, they are a testament to the bad taste that’s become part of the zeitgeist of Didi’s Kolkata — a veritable affront to the city’s “Bhadralok” culture.

It would be a stretch to link Kolkata’s ghastly street illumination to Bengali bhadraloks (respectable gentry) wanting to turn their backs on Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee this election season. But those sickening blue and white lights (‘tuni bulbs’ in local patois) that’re here to stay are one more symbol of the growing disconnect between Mamata and the Bengali bhadralok — the genteel, educated, middle and upper middle class, the upholders of cultural refinement, who had once given their seal of approval on her bid to oust the Left from Bengal.

Messiah for the Rural and Semi-Urban Masses

Will that disconnect translate into a significant loss of votes for the TMC when the West Bengal Assembly poll results are declared on 19 May? Or will it further cement her winnability among her primary vote bank – the rural and semi-urban masses who see her as their messiah, and by virtue of it, the very antithesis of Bengal’s dwindling elite.

To them, she is the all-powerful, yet comfortingly familiar, “Didi”. One who not only showers them with freebies, but also dresses like them, lives in humble quarters like them, talks like them, and even lets loose an earthy near-expletive or two. She can talk about her opponents trying to give her “bamboo” (shafting her from behind) without turning a hair. Last week she described the BJP as a ‘bhayanak jaali’ party (a terrifyingly dishonest party), the word “jaali” picked straight from the crude lingo of the streets.   

Bhadraloks may have shuddered in distaste. But no doubt her core constituency made up of “small” people — the pejorative “chhotolok” in Bangla — lapped it up.

A man sits on pavement as another on a bicycle passes a wall campaign urging to vote for a TMC candidate in Kolkata, April 6, 2016. (Photo: AP)

Disenchantment Among the ‘Bhadralok’

• February 2012: Mamata draws flak for her comments on the Park Street rape, she had called the incident ‘sajano golpo (a fabricated story)’.
  
• April 2012: Jadavpur University chemistry professor, Ambikesh Mahapatra arrested for poking fun at Mamata.
  
• May 2012: Mamata walks out of a TV show calls a student ‘Maoist’ after she asked a question on law and order.
  
• April 2013: Multi-crore-rupee Saradha chit fund goes bust; CBI arrests Bengal Transport Minister Madan Mitra in December 2014. Several TMC leaders come under the scanner.
  
• March 2016: Narada sting shows 13 Trinamool leaders accepting cash.
  
• April 2016: An under-construction flyover collapses in Central Kolkata, killing 26 and injuring nearly hundred others.
  

Disillusionment among the Bhadralok

To be sure, Mamata began to alienate the intelligentsia soon after she stormed to power in 2011. Fatigued by 34 years of Left misrule, they had joyfully embraced the enticing vision of “poribarton” she had held up. But instead of an enlightened regime, what followed were shades of autocracy and attempts to muzzle dissent of any kind.

In 2012, Jadavpur University professor, Ambikesh Mohapatra was arrested for circulating online a cartoon lampooning Mamata. The same year Mamata dubbed the Park Street rape, where a woman was raped in a moving car, an incident fabricated to malign her government. And when top cop Damayanti Sen cracked the case, giving a lie to Mamata’s assertion that the rape was trumped up, the Chief Minister promptly rewarded her with a punishment posting.

Often, her whimsicality verged on paranoia. When a young girl threw a poser about her governance at a townhall with students in 2012, Mamata called her a “Maoist” and stomped off in rage.

Today, five years after she assumed office, industry has languished in spite of her much-publicised attempts to invite capital into the state; the rule of the danda driven by TMC goons has found increasing sway in the hinterland; and much of the party brass have been implicated in corruption scandals. The multi-crore Saradha chit fund scam that blew up in 2013 exposed key party-men such as Madan Mitra and Kunal Ghosh’s involvement. And a sting operation by a news portal called Narada (the rhyming names give the scandals a delicious, headline-friendly piquancy) aired last month, showed what looked like TMC bigwigs snapping up wads of cash in return for promises of favours to a (fictitious) company.

To the Bengali bhadralok the spectacle of corruption was complete — from the aesthetic to the political to the financial.

Excavator machines remove debris of a partially collapsed overpass in Kolkata, April 1, 2016. (Photo: AP)

Will Tainted Image Play a Spoilsport?

Mamata’s cultural credo was jarring from the outset. She has always tried to project herself as a “cultured” Chief Minister, an artist as well as a patron of the arts. She paints, she writes poetry, she renames roads and metro stations after Bengal’s many luminaries with gay abandon; in her inimitable style she could call a bridge “Ma” or a government building “Nabanna” (a festival); she flattens and mauls Bangla pronunciation until you feel THAT is what the language really sounds like; and she blares Rabindrasangeet from imperfect audio systems at traffic signals — perhaps to add a dash of “refinement” to the nasty business of being stuck amidst jams and vehicular exhaust.

But if one found her stabs at culture a trifle droll, there was no quarrelling with her image of probity. For all her whimsicality and her authoritarian ways, what seemed to redeem her was that she was the plain-living Didi-next-door, a people’s leader who eschewed every luxury and privilege.

Thanks to Saradha and Narada, that image is now looking a bit worse for the wear. Too many TMC politicians close to her have been caught with their hands in the till. The collapse of a flyover in north Kolkata early this month that claimed 26 lives was yet another episode in the TMC’s alleged corruption saga. As bodies were dragged out of the rubble, stories of an unholy nexus between inept subcontractors and the powers-that-be came to the fore.

All this makes the Bhadralok class’s disenchantment with Mamata’s government near absolute today. The point is, does it matter? Remember, the TMC swept the Kolkata civic polls last year, winning 114 out of 144 wards. It also won 69 of the 91 municipalities in districts across West Bengal. This, after thousands lost their savings in the gargantuan Saradha swindle.

Of course, the Left-Congress alliance in the state could lead to the TMC slipping well below the 184 seats it had won in 2011. But win or lose, it’s the unpolished “chhotolok”, the small folk, who will make the difference. Bengal’s Bhadralok brigade, that endangered species sullenly watching civility, gentility and good taste vanishing all around, simply don’t count anymore.

(The writer is a senior journalist based in Delhi)

Also Read:
Amidst Narada & the Flyover Collapse, Bengal Faces Quiet Anguish
In Bengal’s Spooky Assembly Polls, a Ghostly Dance of Democracy