I’M at one of those wedding-type dinners serviced by a well-known Calcutta catering company. For some reason there are no paper napkins between the plates stacked at the starting point of the buffet table. As I reach the end of the assembly line, my plate now loaded, I ask one of the serving staff for some napkins. The young guy goes backstage and returns with a packet wrapped in plastic. He carefully tears open the wrapping, pulls out four napkins and extends his hand, keeping one napkin loose for me to take. As his hand starts to withdraw, I reach for a couple more but the man jerks his hand, trying to snatch away the bunch, looking over his shoulder for the manager, scared of being reprimanded. Suddenly, at a supposedly lavish dinner reception in one of Calcutta’s poshest clubs, I find myself in a tug of war with a waiter over three extra paper napkins.

Till recently, the base fare for a Calcutta taxi was ‘twenty rupees plus two’ and the overall fare system such that you had to double the amount on the meter and add two rupees to the sum. Most rides being of minimum fare, if you happened to be in a hurry, and didn’t have the two rupees in change, you could easily end up in a heated argument with the taxi-driver. The driver would have stopped his car in the middle of the road, blocking others behind him, and he wouldn’t think twice about getting into a ten-minute wrangle – at the peak of rush hour – for two rupees. On the other hand, I’ve also seen passengers hold up the traffic, fighting like Bengal tigers for the four or five rupees of change the taxi driver is unable to provide. If in Calcutta, the hand-to hand combat is about rupees in single figures; in the suburbs, small towns and villages it’s about noyaa-poishaa, about chaar-aana and aath-aana. Upon returning from super-inflationary Bombay and Delhi, one way you know you’re back home is when your wallet suddenly starts to bulge with small coins that are almost extinct in other cities.

In the roadside tea-stalls, the old fired clay cups have now mostly been replaced. The chaayer-bhaand is now almost gone, the tea now being served in tiny thimbles made from some cheap and toxic plastic substance. Now, when you buy a cup of tea, it scalds your fingers through the plastic, there is no rim from which to hold it till it cools, the quality of the tea itself has gone down, and the plastic makes it taste even more foul. And the worst thing, perhaps, is that the damage to the local environment is increasing a million non-biodegradable thimbles at a time.

In Calcutta and in Bengal, the last few decades have left profound scars and a widespread, deep internalization of material scarcity. This, in turn, has engineered a hardwiring of chronic pessimism across generations, not just about economic challenges but everything else as well. There is a stinginess of spirit here and it erratically but regularly injects fuel into delusionary bravado and self-defeating violence.

It is from this narrow-eyed, small-minded, fear-ridden precinct that Mamata Banerjee has risen and it is this zone she primarily addresses as a ruler. Banerjee, one can never remind oneself enough, was not the architect of this bitter parochialism and paranoia but its product and its victim. But, as we know, victims of certain kinds of abuse all too easily end up victimizing others.

 

There is a story, unverified but probably not apocryphal, from Banerjee’s first day as chief minister. Just before the ceremony, the state’s chief secretary asks Madam for her list of ministers for the swearing in. At first, Madam is somewhat at a loss. Then she looks around, demanding a piece of paper. Someone tears out a sheet from a notebook. On this sheet, Mamata Banerjee quickly assigns herself nine ministries, adds a couple of names attached to specific ministries (one imagines, say, Amit Mitra for finance) and then puts down the list of the other ministers but specifies no portfolios.

When the chief secretary asks which ministries go with the names, she allegedly says, ‘o gulo aapni bhorey diin’, ‘you please fill those in.’ In the most polite secretary-ish tones, the senior bureaucrat begins to protest. ‘Madam, how can I? These are your ministers…’ But Madam insists he does as he is told and flaps away in her hawaii chappals. She has no time for these petty details. It’s completely irrelevant to her who gets which minor ministry – after all, they are all hers and it is she who will be making the decisions, it is she who will okay the handing out of every single paper napkin.

 

As has become clearer and clearer, the flip side of this egomania is that Mamata Banerjee still doesn’t quite believe that she’s in power. Even now Banerjee is still fighting the election she already won a year and half ago; even after eighteen months she has still not internalized either the security or the responsibility that comes with winning office. In fact, all of Banerjee’s moves, whether spectacular, shooting herself in the foot or chopping off the slightest pretence at being a democratic government, are all made from the same repeating impulse: to uproot and destroy all opposition and hold on to power for as long as humanly possible. Looking back at this first period of Banerjee’s rule, historians will be hard put to find a single Trinamul initiative that hasn’t stemmed from the terror of losing power, a single government programme that is, somehow, ‘election-neutral’. The irony is that it’s this fear-driven knee-jerking that may well bring about an early end to what could have been a long innings at Writers Building.

As the final stage of the state elections began in May 2011, there was a televised Town Hall ‘debate’ conducted by Rajdeep Sardesai. The participants included college students, some of us journalists, ‘ordinary citizens’, a CPM tyro brought in from Delhi and, representing the TMC, Derek O’Brien. During one of the many passages that descended into shouting matches, the young CPM think-tanker asked O’Brien a question. ‘I don’t have to answer any of your questions!’ roared O’Brien, ‘You have to answer mine!’ I remember calling out, ‘Derek, you have only two weeks left where you can refuse to answer questions, maybe get used to answering them now!’ In a less flip tone, Manini Chatterjee of The Telegraph laid out her fear that, no matter who won, Bengal would not get what it so desperately needed: the two major opposing political parties working with each other in some sort constructive, bipartisan engagement. I remember Derek O’Brien nodding sagely at the time, as if in agreement, as if to say, ‘Yes, this is part of the poriborton we aim to bring about.’

 

Instead, what has happened is this: the prototype developed by the CPM over the last three decades, of what a political analyst friend of mine calls ‘governance/lumpenance’, has now been turned into a Standard Operating Procedure by the Trinamul. This ‘SOP’ is run on a single, principle of war: the opposition has no right to exist, its command structures must be terminally degraded, its rank and file decimated, the survivors scattered and then absorbed in some way as subject cannon-fodder. From 1977 on, this is what the CPM tried and almost succeeded in doing with the Congress opposition in the state. Mamata Banerjee, then a young Congress firebrand, was one of those who suffered most under this assault and she hasn’t forgotten.

So, even as the CPM’s jilla offices are being ‘captured’ in the villages, even as communist leaders are being run out of their homes prior to the panchayat elections, some of the people doing the attacking and uprooting have now changed sides at least twice and served three different parties: some of the more senior musclemen began their careers taking orders from Priya Ranjan Das Munshi and Subroto Mukherjee during the Emergency before shifting allegiance to the everlasting CPM and then abandoning that sinking ship to climb on to the Mamata bandwagon. No matter who has been in power in Writers’ Building, since the early ’70s it is these men, and the succeeding generations they have trained, who have run the governance/lumpenance of West Bengal. The concepts of bipartisanship and collegiality are not ones that come easily to these men or, indeed, to their current leader.

 

A narrative goes that a semi-official goonda cadre was put together in the early ’70s under the then Chief Minister Siddhartha Shankar Ray, with tacit green-lighting from Indira Gandhi. This quasi-militia, it is said, was initially quietly sanctioned in the early ’70s as a kind of auxiliary force to help the struggling police counter the Naxalites. This ‘cadre’ was then ruthlessly used by Ray through the Emergency to stamp on other opposition. In this story, you have the suave, plummy-English-speaking patrician barrister as the face of the Congress regime in Bengal, while the ‘boys’ conduct what John Le Carre calls ‘wet-work’ in the back-streets of the city and the lanes of the mofussil towns.

When the Left Front comes to power in 1977, they too, like the Mamata Brigade, take oath under a sense of disbelief. But they overcome that sense of unreality quickly and they set about, quite efficiently, to shore up their power and to take revenge. Part of this post election ‘takeover’ involves pulling in some of the goonda cadre and forming the village level ‘Boys’ Clubs’ that will control the state for the next thirty years. Again, the face of the regime is a dhoti-wearing, scotch-drinking, English-proficient barrister-babu, except that, at the Calcutta Club, Jyoti Basu sits at a different table, quite far away from his fellow club member, S.S. Ray.

Mamata Banerjee comes from the same background as the street muscle and, if you look back at it, her battle has been against both these barrister-babus. From the moment she first came to public attention, when she jumped on to the bonnet of Jayaprakash Narayan’s Ambassador, she has continually expressed a taandav of underclass anger. That fury bifurcated by the mid-’80s when she realized that Ray’s successors weren’t about to provide any steel for a fight against Indira Gandhi’s pal Jyoti Basu. Over the next twenty years, the twin strands of rage corded into a jugaadu but extremely tensile cable with which she began to lacerate her enemies. The terminal signs for the Left Front’s rule appeared in 2007 when the street muscle began to defect to the Trinamul. When Banerjee and her scrawled list took the oath of government in May 2011, it wasn’t just the Trinamul ejecting the old men of the CPM leadership: the back-streets of Kalighat, with their grease and grime-covered auto-workshops, were also, finally, ejecting the dilapidated Calcutta Club.

 

There is a strong conviction among many that Mamata Banerjee is mad. She might share some classic fascistic personality traits with others – especially the paranoid megalomania – but she also suffers from other psychological conditions that make her a quite different proposition from Modi, Jayalalithaa or her closest equivalent (yet not very close) Mayawati. There may be equally thick radiation zones of fear around the chief ministers’ offices in Ahmedabad, Chennai or in Mayawati’s Lucknow, but nowhere in India except Writers Building do the bureaucrats and party workers go to work with the dread of people being daily forced to play Russian Roulette. The courtiers around Modi or Jayalalithaa more or less know what the boss wants and where not to stray, but with Banerjee even her closest associates are not sure what each new day will bring, where the minefield might have shifted overnight.

 

In the meantime, predictions that the TMC would start to cannibalize itself within a couple of years of being in government seem to be coming true. While Banerjee herself may be proudly and loudly ascetic and un-corrupt, at the middle and lower levels of the party people are already wrestling quite openly with each other for the spoils of power. The splits in both the TMC and CPM may not be as spectacular and visible as some people imagined in 2011, but they are definitely showing up, and more so in the TMC. After a year and a half, Banerjee’s own simple lifestyle, her eschewing of chief ministerial accommodation etc., is proving irrelevant. While she conducts her daily lunacy at a higher altitude, the local satraps around Calcutta, its margins, and in the small towns are free to raise the going rate of the kickbacks (allegedly a flat 10% during the CPM rule, but now a free-market jamboree ranging between 15% and 25%). The various ganglords who supported Banerjee and the TMC are now involved in turf-wars from Rajarhat and Behala in Calcutta to Nadia and Mednipur in the state outside. Stories of scandals and sexual shenanigans of the kind unimaginable with the Victorian-corseted CPM babus, stories whether true, exaggerated or false, now abound.

A counter theory goes somewhat like this: despite the state assembly win, the post-Congress alliance panchayat elections have become a major concern for the TMC. Should Banerjee sweep those elections flying solo, she would be in a position to make some difficult decisions and finally start to bring in her long-promised poriborton; joke or not, Empress of Ad Hoc or no, crude and crass or not, this would see her entrenched for a long time to come.

 

No matter what the state of Banerjee’s mind, the CPM in opposition is definitely showing signs of deep schizophrenia. One comrade, quite high in the non-geriatric level of the state party, tells me the party is ‘basically giving Mamata a walkover’ in the panchayat elections. How can we fight, goes the plaint, when our local leaders have been killed, when so many have been run out of their homes? At the same time, there are others in the party licking their chops every time Banerjee commits one of her regular self-embarrassments or own goals, salivating at the prospect of a miraculously early return to power. Yet again there’s another comrade brought into the middle-level as ‘new management’ who tells me, (a) that he hopes there are no early victories for the party and that he hopes the party is out of power for at least ten years, because (b) the party needs to be thoroughly purged of the ‘wrong elements’.

Just in case I start getting optimistic at this seemingly healthy and honest assessment, the comrade then lays out a paean to Joseph Stalin, about what a great leader he was, about how the figures for the people killed in the gulags have been exaggerated by counter-revolutionary historians (‘It was only a few hundred thousand, never in the millions!’) and how ‘centrist-liberals’ like myself do not understand why the people of Bengal have to be (again!) brought under the ideology of Great Comrade Djugashvili for their own good. I finish my drink and leave before I completely lose my centrist-liberal temper. As I take the taxi home, I begin to wonder who is more lunatic, Mamata Banerjee or the middle-management of the CPM.

 

The fact is, no one in Bengal wants the CPM back for a long time. Even if the Trinamul takes serious damage or disintegrates over the next few years, chances are it’s not going to be either the Congress or the CPM that gain but most likely some mixture of the BJP and possibly some new Bengali-identity formation.

Mamata Banerjee may or may not be mentally unstable, but the fact is she yet again brings to the fore the elite’s reaction against the common people of India. She may have become everybody’s favourite object of ridicule, everybody, that is, in the urban Indian middle class, but the joke may be the other way around: despite her many problems, Banerjee is still quite secure vis-a-vis her constituency, while it’s the ones sniggering who rapidly need to find their place in the emerging civil wars in India, between the haves and the have-nots.

Mamata Banerjee may be mad but she also represents a larger psychosis of the deprived. It may not be unreasonable to see Banerjee as a new iteration of an old scar now suppurating on the body of Bengal, it may not be too unfair to see her as a nuclear reactor generating toxic new stories every day, stories hilarious yet lethal, but it would be stupid to see her as a passing phenomenon. Whatever she does, whatever happens to her in the future, the marginalization of the ‘educated’, un-engaged, callous middle class will only deepen. And what remains obscured in the quickly shifting plot-line is the fate of the people clutching the napkins, the people who can’t see a fifty rupee fare disappearing as they fight over two rupees, the people whose fingers get scalded every time they try and drink a small cup of tea.