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RIGHT
ANGLE
It
Takes Two To Coalition
Can
a responsible government indulge populists like Mamata?
By
Swapan
Dasgupta
 Stalin,
the marxist historian Isaac Deutscher once wrote, was a consequence of
the backward bleakness of post-Tsarist Russia. By a similar logic, the
emergence of the Mamata Banerjee phenomenon can be attributed to the grim
and brutal cadre Raj nurtured by Jyoti Basu for the past 23 years
in West Bengal. An unrepentant populist with a penchant for throwing shrill
tantrums, Mamata is more than just a politician. She is a crusader, with
a single objective: to dislodge the Left Front from her state. Nothing
else matters to her, neither the larger picture nor the means employed
by her dedicated army of Trinamool Congress supporters. She is the flip
side of a CPI(M) that employs the benign face of Basu to mask its grassroots
ugliness.
At the root
of Atal Bihari Vajpayee's troubles with his Trinamool coalition partner
is an inability to gauge the logic of Mamata's politics. The lady from
Bengal who has made a fetish of austere living and combative thinking
is unwilling to brook any dilution of her stated agenda. Neither constitutional
niceties, such as the formidable hurdles in the path of peremptorily dismissing
the Basu Government, nor prudent economics—the fiscal madness involved
in rolling back the price hike of petroleum products—fit into her
larger design. She believes in countering political ruthlessness with
a bulldozer. It's a scorched-earth approach that corresponds to the desperation
of Bengalis overwhelmed by their growing irrelevance and steady decline.
The hopelessness of a future dictates the recklessness of the present.
The problem
is that a culture of competitive wildness cannot go hand in hand with
the obligations of a responsible government. Nurtured in the best traditions
of parliamentary etiquette and propped up by a middle-class social base
that seeks to combine tradition with prosperity, Vajpayee is naturally
ill at ease with Mamata's political style. The indulgence that has been
showered on her for the past two years is on account of her uncompromising
anti-Left stand. It's a relationship centred partly on an admiration of
Mamata's courage and substantially on expediency. The BJP recognises that
if the CPI(M) is to be dislodged from Bengal, Mamata is the instrument.
But there
are inherent limits to indulgence. It is not possible for the Centre to
pursue the political and economic tenets of a Pol Pot just because it
suits Mamata in Bengal. A national government has to be mindful of its
larger responsibilities. Nor does it make political sense for a national
party like the BJP to abandon its nominal presence in Bengal because Mamata
believes that only she can be the Bengali voice in the NDA Government.
Rather than see the induction of BJP's Satyabrata Mukherjee as evidence
of the importance of Bengal in the Centre, Mamata has taken it as a personal
affront. It smacks of arrogance, pettiness and a disregard of coalition
culture.
Where Mamata
seems to be getting her sums wrong is in believing Bengal's salvation
is possible without any reference to national politics. This cocooned
approach may gain momentum if she manages to forge a mahajot that includes
the Congress and breakaway factions of the CPI(M) and excludes the BJP.
But Bengal's problems since 1977 stem substantially from its complete
lack of a presence at the Centre, except during the two years of United
Front rule. If Mamata too decides to chart that course by walking out
of the NDA, she will lose the one thing that made her distinct from the
CPI(M): her ability to give India a stake in Bengal.
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