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5 May 2011, Gateway House

The Election Diaries 2011: West Bengal, Day one: ‘Didi” the Poetician

Gateway House's Executive Director, Manjeet Kripalani, gives us a view from the ground in the last phase of state assembly elections in India's eastern state of West Bengal. The elections are crucial for an incumbent Communist alliance that has ruled for the last 3 decades and is trying to recapture its citadel.

Executive Director, Gateway House

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The land in Singur is green and prosperous for miles and miles, the air clean and clear, the villages looking like any other in Bengal. Yet this is the place where the battle for India’s economic future began to play out two years ago and where Mamata Banerjee, the challenger to the entrenched Communist government in West Bengal, planted the seed of her political future. The Tata factory where the Nano car would have been produced before Tata was forced to leave, is half-built and abandoned, and the fight between the Communist government and the villagers has now acquried the status of murky mythology. No one can remember what the issue was really about.

But Mamata Banerjee is for real here. She has promised the villagers a rail way coach factory in the place of the Tata factory, and they feel it is a better bet. “Tata would have built a five-star hotel and left,” says Manoranjan Malick, a landless labourer whose daughter was killed by the state police in the violence in Singur. Surjit Bhalla, the well regarded economist places the truth on the table: “Singur is a classic case of how to build a political party.”

Indeed, Mamata Banerjee has followed the book on this. She tapped into the resentment and unhappiness with the Communist government in Singur, and built herself a political base from where she will win her state. Now, in the state elections in Bengal, Mamata is the candidate of choice – and the only one with the guts to oust an entrenched, venal and violent incumbent of 30 years. But the unhappiness is so deep, she has to do more than sweep the elections – she has to deliver to a young and unemployed Bengal economic growth and social confidence in short order.

She seems to sense how. In Barjora, in Bardhaman district in South West Bengal which is due to go to the polls next week, Banerjee addresses a crowd of thousands who have been waiting four hours to her hear views. This is die-hard Communist country, but ‘Didi’ (as she is called) is the new star and will likely wrest the constituency from the incumbent. This small woman in her trademark crushed cotton saree, speaks to the dreams of the young 20-something crowd, almost all of whom are unemployed. Unlike most Indian politicians who address large rallies and talk down to the crowds from their dazzling diases, Banerjee talks to people as an equal and with compassion.

Her style is her own. First she sets forth some housekeeping details – the election schedule. Then a laundry list of the sins of the Communist party over the years. “They banned English education for the public, but taught their own children Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and turned them into barristers,” she said. “Then they shut down 55,000 factories and the only industy left is one which makes bombs and imports goons into the state to commit atrocities.” The crowd roars with approval.

Then Banerjee shifts into high gear, and shouts, “No more CPM!” followed by her schedule of promises and improvements. In two years, she says, she will build 16 hospitals for the state so people don’t have to leave the state to receive medical care, and provide a proper education for 10 lakh children. She saves the best for last: The Communists took out of the school curricula, the study of the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore and Nazrul Islam, and of Bengal heros like ‘Binoy, Badal and Dinesh’ – she will put them right back into school studies.

Only in Bengal can a politician win a vote by promising to introduce poetry into the school curriculum.

Image courtesy: AlJazeeraEnglish/Flickr

Manjeet Kripalani is Executive Director of Gateway House: Indian Council on Global Relations. 

This blog was exclusively written for Gateway House: Indian Council on Global Relations. You can read more exclusive content here.

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