mamata Banerjee’s naïve politics of muslim appeasement
has dug a grave for Trinamool congress that Bjp just
pushed it into. mamata’s huge promise of ‘paribartan’ or
change has blown in the face of naked extortionism
maa in ‘maati’...
maanush furious!
W
hen Mamata Banerjee led a
gigantic people’s rally in central
Kolkata a couple of days after
her party’s stunning electoral
victory in 2011, she and the
Trinamool Congress genuinely represented hope. The
people of Bengal had booted out the hated CPI(M)-led
Left Front, mobilised as they were by Mamata over the
twin issues surrounding nandigram and Singur.
Mamata’s rhetoric of ma-maati-maanush appeared to
have captured the imagination of Bengal. She had
promised paribartan change and her party’s manifesto
waxed eloquent on how Bengal would be transformed
in no time.
But by the time her first year in office ended, her
image and that of the TMC had begun cracking up,
enmeshed as she and some of her party colleagues were
by allegations involving the Sarada and Rose Valley chit
fund cases. The people mocked her move to play
recorded Rabindra Sangeet numbers at street
intersections. her penchant for painting on canvas was
seen as a fake attempt to project herself as a refinedconnoisseur and practitioner of an art that was good
only for the campaign leading up to her 2011 victory.
Whispers turned into torrents of public anger when
it was revealed that some of her abstract paintings were
sold for a few crores, whose trail led uncomfortably
close to the TMC. Bengalis were not amused when
financial scandals, surrounding the awarding of
contracts to paint public buildings and other
government installations white-and-blue, surfaced to
reveal that the only beneficiary was her nephew
Abhishek who had earlier been inducted into the TMC
and given an elevated position in the party’s power
hiera rchy.shadow deals
There were allegations that a shadowy company run by
Abhishek was the sole beneficiary of a contract
involving the purchase and installation of trident-
shaped street lights. There were no serious attempts to
pull Bengal out of the economic morass: the state’s
coffers remained empty, public debt continued to
mount, visits abroad to fetch investments were simply