The forever opponent!
Didi, the irrepressible Chief Minister of West Bengal, is at it again. She is back in dharna, protesting in Esplanade, repeating her 26-day dharna and fast-unto-death of 2006, demanding return of the acquired farmlands to the tillers, which propelled her to the Writers’ Buildings as the Chief Minister and helped defeat the left-front government. However, it had a flip side: the then-commissioned Tata Nano factory shut down and later shifted to Sanand in Gujarat, causing a continued and irreversible drought in the industrial investment scenario in West Bengal.
Mamata, as an opposition leader, has been quite visible, doing dharnas at a drop of a hat. However, the trait of opposition never left her, even when she assumed power in 2011. Banerjee hurried to the Bhowanipore police station in South Kolkata to secure the release of a few of her party’s supporters, whom the police were allegedly holding without an FIR. In 2011 In 2019, she had sat in front of her police chief’s house when the CBI were to raid him in relation to one or another scam. She also sat in protest in 2021 near the Gandhi statue on Red Road, protesting the Election Commission of India’s 24-hour ban on her campaign in the ongoing state assembly polls. Mamata repeated her dharna in front of Nizam Palace over the CBI’s arrest of her senior ministers, Subrata Mukherjee and Firhad Hakim, and MLA Madan Mitra and former Mayor Sovan Chatterjee in connection with the Narada Scam.
Later, she realised that her image as a probable future prime minister might be adversely impacted, reduced her protests, and took to marches, either walking or on a wheel chair. Subsequently, she improvised her protests by moving courts, with ever-obligated lawyers like Abhishek Manu Singhvi, a Congress Rajya Sabha member elected with the Trinamool Party’s support, rushing to the court at every given opportunity. Mamata had to address two questions: the ever-increasing unfriendliness of the Calcutta High Court and the unpredictability of the Supreme Court, and the need to assure her electorate (the minority vote bank) of her undiminished strength as a leader who can fearlessly confront PM Modi.
She therefore is sitting in the dharna for two days as I am posting this, against the Centre for withholding Bengal’s dues and has ordered all her MPs to join her in the dharna. Many BJP spokespersons and the state LoP are shouting of embezzlement of more than Rs. 2 lakh crores by the Trinamool party. The state has not bothered to respond to CAG accusations of irregularities on many accounts, which have met with stony silence or retorts of a witch hunt by the Centre.
What confounds everyone is why she is not going to court challenging the Centre’s illegal withholding of funds to West Bengal.
My guess is as good as yours.
Sampath Kumar
Intrépide Voix
