The Didi Paradox In West Bengal

In a Bengal that has shed ideals and ideology for pragmatism, politics still swirls around Mamata Banerjee, loved by the bustees and dismissed by the bhadralok. Sunanda K Datta-Ray on the Didi paradox.

- Sunanda K Datta-Ray

Lok Sabha, panchayat or municipal elections. People still call her ‘Maa Durga’. She personifies hope in the slums of Calcutta and the villages of Bengal where 70 per cent of voters—80 per cent of whom are marginal peasants or landless labourers—live.

She is one of them. She must be one of the very few women politicians of consequence to have risen to eminence without the help of a man. Unlike Tarakeshwari Sinha in Bihar, Orissa’s Nandini Satpathy, Tamil Nadu’s Jayalalithaa or Mayawati in Uttar Pradesh, she hasn’t reinvented a glamorous self. Didi remains the ultimate in simplicity. She is the prisoner of her class. “I will turn Kolkata into London” sounds stupid only to those who know London. For millions of Indians—especially Bengalis—London is the aspirational Elysium. Lighting up Kolkata like an amusement park with strings of blue and white bulbs may seem cheap and showy. Not to villagers who, bussing in for the obligatory tour of Kalighat, jadu ghar (Indian Museum) and the chiriakhana (zoo), think they have stepped into a twinkling fairyland.

With her finger on this pulse, Didi well knows what indulgences they wouldn’t tolerate. She would not dream of having ‘Mamata Banerjee’ woven into her sari. Nor would she boast of her buddy ‘Barack’. Self-respect might even have persuaded her to decline a Buckingham Palace invitation to lunch if Queen Elizabeth hadn’t also asked her to spend a night or two under the royal roof like China’s Xi Jinping. Not that she boycotted the Palace. Hearing that Her Majesty’s second son, Prince Andrew, was interested in teenage girls, she went there and heard all about his involvement in a project for trafficking victims in Kolkata. Naturally, Mum wasn’t present. This was no concocted affair (sajano bepaar).