Between 2011 and 2021 West Bengal was dominated by the personality of Mamata Banerjee and the period can be described as the Mamata era. She destroyed the power of both the Maoists and Left Front after coming to power, introduced several populist schemes and appeared to be the undisputed ruler of the state by 2016. However, she committed a same-side goal in the panchayat election of 2018 and gave a fresh lease of life to the opposition. Ironically, it was not the left but the right that capitalised on it.
The electoral implications of the 2019 Lok Sabha election results in West Bengal are traced, and whether it heralds a movement from “poribarton” to “real poriborton,” is analysed. The National Election Study 2019 data is used to explain the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party in the state and the eclipse of the Congress as well as the Left Front.
The outcome of the West Bengal assembly elections raises important questions. For one, it questions the narrative of rural appeasement by populist schemes undertaken by the incumbent government versus discontent in urban areas. The success of the welfare schemes, in any case, is put in check by extortion, lumpen practices, corruption as well as discrimination in favour of Trinamool Congress supporters. The hurriedly put together alliance between the Left Front and Congress could offer no viable alternative to the ruling regime.
The sessions court verdict in the Kamduni gang rape case has been welcomed by the villagers and activists who have been protesting both the atrocity as well as the complicity of the state government in the act.
Under the NDA government a small question becomes a life-anddeath question while genuinely large questions are of no interest to any of the alliance partners. The alliance is threatened because a zonal railway is proposed to be split. It is not threatened because the party which leads the alliance carries out a twomonth long carnage in a state where it governs.
When the arithmetic is all done and the rhetoric has worn out, what emerges is an annual plan for the railways, not directed at growth but increasing distress. All the current signals are that railway minister Mamata Banerjee’s attempts to garner popular support through gimmickry is likely to boomerang. She has over the last two years constructed tracks, which will lead the railways to increasing disarray and oblivion. Even the moderately budget-literate members of her constituencies – the ordinary Indian who is being provided with “travel opportunity” at “affordable rates” and the housewives whose budget has been spared any increase due to hike in freight charges on salt, grains and pulses, sugar, fruits and vegetables, urea, edible oil, kerosene and LPG – will realise that running an enterprise like the railways requires an adequate income for overall, long-term development. Banerjee’s ‘housewife’ will know that if one is not to become dependent on the local moneylender, resources have to be generated in-house no matter how difficult that may sound. Such wisdom has not come the way of the railway minister.
