How Didi Took on Modi

Mamata Banerjee attacked Narendra Modi with the same intensity as in the past elections, but this time she introduced ridicule as part of her strategy

- Snigdhendu Bhattacharya

THERE was a family where the man used to lie a lot, which made his wife feel ashamed. Before a train journey, as the wife was feeling uncomfortable, the husband said, “Alright, if I lie too much, pretend to cough. I will get the signal.”

During the journey, a fellow passenger asked the man where he was going. He said he was going tiger hunting. The fellow passenger, surprised, asked if he had been tiger hunting before. The husband said, yes. The other man asked how big the tiger was. The husband said its tail itself was of the length of 12 arms.

The wife coughed. The husband corrected himself, saying it could also be 10 arms’ length, as he did not measure it. The wife coughed. The husband corrected himself again, saying the tail could also be eight arms long since he had not measured the animal. The wife coughed again. Now, the husband was livid. He shouted, “You may die coughing, I am not going to reduce the length anymore.”

That’s Modi for you!

This is from a Bengali joke retold by West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee during an election rally in Raidighi, South 24 Parganas district, on May 24.

That day, she was in the mood to ridicule Prime Minister Narendra Modi. She started by referring to Odisha’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Sambit Patra’s May 20 remark that Lord Jagannath is Modi’s devotee. Though Patra later clarified that it was “a slip of the tongue”, and that he intended to say Modi is Lord Jagannath’s devotee, opposition politicians picked up the issue.

TAKING JIBES AT MODI FOR HIS ALLEGED USE OF THE TELEPROMPTER WHILE DELIVERING SPEECHES HAS BEEN ONE OF BANERJEE’S FAVOURITES SINCE THE 2019 ELECTORAL CAMPAIGN.

Patra’s statement, incidentally, was followed by Modi’s own claim that he was convinced his birth was not biological, and God had sent him with a purpose.