The Fascist Messiah: Mamata Banerjee and her ten months

Messy slums, dirty clothes and a kind of a roof standing on something like bamboos. A shabby picture to some, to some eloquent suited ones in Armanis, it is abomination. Okay! Hold the thought.  Now imagine a guy stepping out of a chauffeur driven SUV walking straight into the drawing room adorned with Italian Marble and imported furniture. Now ask the same people and they would define this picture as epitome of Sophistication and the former one as visual pollution. Now place the two visuals side by side in your mind’s eye under the same tag line “Different nations in one”. One will realise the entire affair is moral pollution.
Something similar has happened recently in the urban so called cultural capital of the country which was trying to breathe fresh under the new government. A slum full of refugees and job seeking youth from rural Bengal had come and settled in this locality of Nonadanga with an ambition to start a new life with a new job. Nonadanga is what they have been calling home since the time they stepped in this city. A tin roof supported by those loosely held bamboo sticks have never interfered with their idea of what they saw for their home. Yes! It’s past tense now because on the afternoon of an unfaithful April sun, some municipality bulldozers had crushed them to dust while the crying mob was being beaten up by the men in uniform. In fact pregnant women too did not have any exception. Don’t know about the good things as there is so liitle of it around but when it comes to state sponsored terrorism, Mamata Banerjee truly has never discriminated against any caste or creed.  10 months completed at the Writer’s Building and the people in Bengal who once came out in huge majority to elect this representatives in hope of some relief from the assassins in Singur and Nandigram, are already relenting this change. It’s a pity that the youth who campaigned for the TMC some 11 months back wants re-election so that he can vote for the pseudo left not because they are good but because they are the lesser evil, or at least that is what they hope now. Because life for them has not really left them with any other alternative rather than to hope against another political hope. So let’s try and see what the Bengali working class has stood to benefit in these ten months of what was hailed as the historical change. 

To start with the government of West Bengal have managed to reshuffle the High School syllabus with a definite political motive which have seen most of the history chapters on Bolshevism and Marx disappear. Off course the intent is clear even though the path chosen is veiled. The attempt is a clear drive to brush off any possibility of the youth of Bengal taking interest in the names such as Marx and Bolshevik.  But what the rulers fail to appreciate is this insecurity within themselves and the crisis of capitalism that has made them to indulge in their fascist needs.  Marx is not just any name but a representative of an idea for working class amelioration and the one’s who act out of insecurity only does it at the cost of legitimising Marx himself.

“Even if censorship were in fact the same thing as justice, in the first place this would remain a fact without being a necessity. But, further, freedom includes not only what my life is, but equally how I live, not only that I do what is free, but also that I do it freely. Otherwise what difference would there be between an architect and a beaver except that the beaver would be an architect with fur and the architect a beaver without fur?”

The oppressors in the garb of the state infiltrated with their insecurities have also chosen to impose severe punishments to holders of dissenting opinions. A professor, an academic, a respondent of the duties towards our future generation decided to play a spoil sport. Out of ignorance to the demands of the state he dared to create a cartoon of the honourable Chief Minister of Pashchim Banga. The cartoon a satire expressed her as a looter of public money in collaboration with her present railway minister Mukul Roy. And as a result the professor was arrested under a provision of law which was never meant for it. Before he was put inside the bar due to some directive from some unknown boss the officers had asked some local Trinamool party supporters or muscle thuds to walk inside the police station and man-handle the professor in broad day light with absolutely no resistance from the officials in duty who were reduced to mere spectators instead of enforcers of law and order for the time being.

But why would these people have dissented if she was doing things as fine as she claims them to be. In a recently held public meeting Ms. Banerjee had the audacity to face thousands of people from the working class in a public meeting and lie to them on their face. Her sole point was that her government deserves a 9 on 10 if evaluated by the sane. I guess she is now looking forward to change some of our well accepted definitions as well because I cant quite agree with her claims from the “sane” in this context.

However the fact remains that the people have been tired by her rule of ten months adorned with lies and fake promises. They don’t like it when favouritism is being shown to one religious sect at the cost of public exchequer only to meet her needs of vote bank politics. In a recent move she promised to pay wages to all maulavis of the state. This did not quite go down well even with her voters as the last thing they wanted in the name of the change is a subtle replacement of the CPIM misrule. Not only does the move distinguishes amongst common man on the basis of religion but the worst is it comes at the cost of the common tax payers sweat, and all this for her own vote bank garnish at a time when the state is under a 2000 crore debt.

In fact her ignorance towards the common tax payer has been a talking point for some time now. The first time this ignorance issue became a serious talking point was when she blamed a rape victim of getting raped only to conspire against her government. Yes and this came from a lady chief minister. The feminists of the country started rallying against her callousness and the bourgeois intellectuals complained vehemently over their cup of tea. This went on and its months now and the culprits are conveniently at large. In fact the brother of the alleged is a local Trinamool worker in their locality and a huge financer of the party’s local demands. And this is not all. The police officer who defied her and went on with the investigation only to prove that the rape charges were genuine and even arrested a few links was soon transferred to the training department. The culprit has not been found since then and the memory of the rape has been lost to the IPL frenzy.

Some people who kept on talking about these issues had seriously offended the already grumpy chief minister surrounded by “conspiracies”! a few of these news papers who would occasionally go on writing about the nuisance that they thought the new government was, managed to displease the rulers so much that the state sponsored libraries failed to renew their subscriptions to these infidel papers of the state under a new law which sought to regulate which papers to be allowed and which ones not in the state library. Some idiots would suppose it was done in the interest of common reader and not a move towards political vendetta. But Ms Banerjee has been openly taking names of some media houses that are deservedly critical about her. The two being a co incidence does not seem like an idea worth conviction to the ones with some grey matter.

Besides the government from within too is not a very pleasant place to be. The infighting between the Congress and the Trinamool is costing the working class a lot of welfare because of the indecision that the inner conflicts have brought along. The partnership is beyond its honeymoon phase and the poorer by the day is at its tolerance’s last. They want an alternative. An alternative which gives them solutions and not the ones which are just products of this capitalist set up and the less evil is the choice of the day.

The people of Bengal need a political face that upholds the working class priorities. They are fed up of the Bhattacharyas and the Banerjees which are churned out of the same capitalist ideas. One might claim to be the messiah of change or the harbinger of industrialisation but Bengal has come to date with its reality. The solution only rests in the mind that is politically conscious of working class needs, and the heart that dares to build a party to the calls of a revolution. A party that acts as a facilitator in the build up to the revolution and vanguards the objective of the revolution once the ruler is behind the bar and the workers on the throne.