OPED | Friday, November 27, 2009 | Email | Print | 
For better or worse?
Shikha Mukerjee
‘Change’ alone means nothing in West Bengal
Species originate through evolution and that remains perhaps the greatest discovery ever even after 150 years. Therefore, West Bengal just has to survive long enough before regime change can happen without being preceded by years of violence, death, destruction and perpetuation of deprivation.
If it is a Trinamool Congress activist who dies one day then there are two if not three Communist Party of India(Marxist) supporters who die the next. The masses, instead of dying dramatically, thereby becoming martyrs to ‘the’ cause, die by degrees. In turbulent times in West Bengal the creaky administration tends to collapse. Political strife tends to convert this into a melodramatic moment of a terrorised people awaiting the apocalypse.
Between 1967 and 1977, West Bengal defied the trend, as Atul Kohli famously described it, and turned the corner, restoring order out of chaos. It now seems that history is all set to repeat itself. Between 2006 and 2011, the chaos will create the conditions for the restoration of the order of the Trinamool Congress.
In other words, by 2011, the Trinamool Congress must evolve to a higher plane of politics. Instead of threatening ‘change’, it must set about the task of preparing to be the agent of a change for the better. How it will go about that extremely challenging job is a matter of speculation, if not irrelevant.
It is the Trinamool Congress’s capacity to evolve that is material to the future of West Bengal. Between its inception and now, as it hurtles to the finish line of 2011 it needs to ensure that it wins on its own a bare majority to establish its dominance over the Congress. It needs to figure out the direction in which it will evolve, because till now it has merely followed the course set by its leader, Ms Mamata Banerjee.
The assessment of the Trinamool Congress, however, cannot be made on the basis of Ms Banerjee’s capacity to evolve; because she cannot do so. She must remain frozen forever, or at least in the foreseeable future, in exactly the same mould as the one in which she had originally cast herself when she split from the Congress in 1997. As a fiery leader, ready to place herself at the forefront of battle is how West Bengal’s masses idolise Ms Banerjee; till she wins the 2011 election and is installed as Chief Minister, she must continue to remain exactly as she is.
Leaders and their parties are one but not the same; the sooner the Trinamool Congress figures out a way of handling this real difference the better it will be. At the rate at which the party, its leaders and even its Ministers are using Ms Banerjee’s name for every twitch and turn, she will be either accused of being a control freak addicted to micromanaging everything or she will inevitably find herself responsible for actions and omissions about which she may have been entirely ignorant.
It has long been said that Ms Banerjee was uneasy about sharing the decision making space within the Trinamool Congress. Leaders who have crossed the floor from the Congress to the Trinamool and then back again have all talked about Ms Banerjee’s iron hand that is rarely gloved in velvet within the confines of the party office. But that was Ms Banerjee as an Opposition leader struggling to make headway against the formidable CPI(M).
Ms Banerjee is now the leader-in-waiting. The Trinamool Congress is the party-in-waiting. Therefore getting their organisational and leadership acts together are an increasingly urgent need. While it is true that Ms Banerjee has adopted a franchisee model in spreading the Trinamool Congress’s influence and done so with spectacular success since 2006, it is also true that that there are no so to say heavyweights within her party’s inner circle. The rainbow alliance of the disgruntled was just one manifestation of the franchisee strategy. The fiefdom established by the Adhikari clan in East Midnapore is another strategy. But all these bits hold together only when Ms Banerjee is the glue.
The big question is whether this is a sustainable model or does the Trinamool Congress need to evolve? In the dozen years since it was set up Ms Banerjee has generated the steam that has taken it forward and upward. West Bengal has grown accustomed to seeing Ms Banerjee leading every movement, taking every decision, being a dynamo of activity.
The Trinamool Congress or perhaps Ms Banerjee herself needs to figure out how this fusion can work when she becomes Chief Minister. The Trinamool Congress and Ms Banerjee herself have made promises, lots and lots of promises. To keep some of them — an efficient people-friendly administration, a non-partisan Government, a pro-industry-pro agriculture Government, a Government that solves the Maoist problem in Lalgarh, the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha problem in Darjeeling, that delivers development to the backward districts, converts Siliguri-Darjeeling into Switzerland, Kolkata into London — and the list is pretty much a fabulous wish-list, Ms Banerjee will have to work hard at governance.
To do all this Ms Banerjee needs to evolve and so does the Trinamool Congress. She will have her work cut out between undoing her handiwork and living up to promises that are in truth formidable targets.
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