Mamata Banerjee’s tongue, while arguing in the Supreme Court, slipped for a moment to claim that ‘BLOs of West Bengal were murdered’ which was swiftly rectified. If such assertions could be marked as ‘arguments’, she argued her case with fervent passion which is hardly heard in courtrooms. Being all ears for West Bengal Chief Minister’s ‘legal arguments’, we ended up disappointed with another set of rants typical of hers.
Mamata’s entry into the Supreme Court breaking all protocols & rules was not possible less the aid of a mighty lobby of the legal fraternity. Would anybody & everybody have such privilege to enter the Supreme Court with apparently a misleading identity? Was Mamata Banerjee enrolled with the State Bar Council of West Bengal in 1975 when she protested by dancing on the bonnet of Jayprakash Narayan’s car? Was she there in 1993 while street-fighting on behalf of the Congress Party against Jyoti Basu led West Bengal Government? Or her name first featured in the members directory of the Bar Association of Calcutta High Court in 2023 under her own rule?
CPM ran a reign of terror in West Bengal letting their strongmen intimidate the media houses that were critical of the state government such as the Anandabazar Group. Changed nothing in the State as the same ABP reporters are still being repeatedly beaten to bleed by Mamata’s hoodlums while the press attempted to cover various elections in the state and the mob violence such as the recent one in Beldanga, Murshidabad just last month.
While the CPM drove 58,000 factories out of West Bengal in their tenure, 21,521 factories closed in the State only between 2016 & 2021. In addition, 6,688 factories shifted out of Bengal between 2011 & 2025, all during the TMC’s tenure. While West Bengal Government under TMC organized ‘Bengal Global Business Summit’ every year, such events neither added to the State’s revenue collection nor brought in any investment of significance. As a result, the Bengalis at present are worshipping not only poverty but beggar-level-poverty by hugging the model of dole politics of Mamata Banerjee marking her as the poor men’s maseeha.
And here lies the clue to decode Mamata’s public support & popularity. She distributes dole to all, retaining the lion’s share for her dear ones, the well-known 75:25 ratio once explained by TMC MP Dola Sen in a viral video. As Mamata genuinely opposed the CPM in West Bengal, the BJP under Atal Behari Vajpayee decided to stand beside her when she launched her new party TMC in 1998, eyeing to replace the Congress Party with the TMC in Bengal. For BJP, it was a small step towards ‘Congress-mukt Bharat’, BJP’s confirmed goal ever since the party came into being.
Within a span of 8 years thereafter, Mamata & her politics was hijacked by the larger left lobby of India and abroad who fielded urban Maoists like Medha Patekar, Arundhati Roy, Anuradha Talwar et al in favour of Mamata’s Singur protest. It was a defeat of the BJP. The lefts offered all their strength to Mamata just in order for resisting the re-industrialization of West Bengal. A large section of the CPI(M) cadres supported her Singur protest, including eminent ones like Ashok Mitra(once Finance Minister of West Bengal in Jyoti Basu cabinet), standing against Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s plan to bring in a car manufacturing industry to Singur.
While Mamata Banerjee gets eulogized as a ‘street fighter’ by the media, the law of swadhin Bharat marks ‘street fight’ a crime. While her rubber chappal became a trademark of her proletarian politics, a Rado watch on the wrist & an iPhone in hand glittered as vivid exhibits of her bourgeois lifestyle. Such split persona of Mamata Banerjee, adorned with Rado watch & iPhone vis-à-vis rubber chappal & white saree turned her Marxists’ favourite as such dichotomous pose satisfied the leftists’ ego. The CPM-inclined upper middle class of Bengal had fallen for her as people loved doles & Mamata didn’t hesitate to gratify them with doles in the form of grants, awards & lucrative committee-memberships etc. Mamata became generous in bribing all, especially the media houses.
Hence, before the 2026 Bengal Election, such media houses would perhaps publish Mamata-eulogy portraying her as the only one amongst the opposition forces who doesn’t feel defeated by the Modi mechanism & hence, the only hope of the opposition, though this seems too optimistic a portrayal of the reality. An alternative perspective to this could be— Mamata doesn’t feel defeated as she doesn’t accept any other mode of politics other than her own because of her split paradigms of thoughts.
People with such split can’t get along with anyone else. So, her undaunted attitude may be a reflection of a deep-seated cerebral idiosyncrasy for which it would not be easy for the opposition to get along with her. Her Rado watch vis-à-vis rubber chappal too reflects the same split psyche of the instinctively sound political persona. While Mamata Banerjee won election after election in West Bengal, what stopped her to keep any significant mark in any other State? Such a question would definitely come in the way of painting Mamata as the national level opposition leader just before 2026 West Bengal election.
