[Ms. Banerjee is the
chief minister of West Bengal, a state more populous than Germany, and she
leads a regional party with 19 ministers in Parliament, a crucial block of
votes for the governing United Progressive Alliance. Indeed, she is so
influential that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton paid her a special
visit on a recent trip to India, a highly unusual honor for any regional
leader.]
 |
Piyal Adhikary/European Pressphoto Agency
Mamata Banerjee, the head of the West Bengal State, in April.
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KOLKATA, India — When Mamata Banerjee, a 5-foot-tall dynamo in flip-flops, finally
defeated the Communists last year after decades of misrule here, she became one
of the most powerful but unpredictable politicians in India. Now the country is
left to guess whether she will announce on Tuesday that she intends to try to
pull down India’s governing coalition.
Ms. Banerjee is the
chief minister of West Bengal, a state more populous than Germany, and she
leads a regional party with 19 ministers in Parliament, a crucial block of
votes for the governing United Progressive Alliance. Indeed, she is so
influential that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton paid her a special
visit on a recent trip to India, a highly unusual honor for any regional
leader.
On Thursday and Friday,
the government pushed through several sweeping policy changes, including one
that would allow Walmart and Ikea to set up shop in India. Ms. Banerjee has
repeatedly opposed plans to open India up to more competition. She is in some
ways more leftist than the Communists she replaced.
But while she has vowed
to protest the changes, it is unclear whether she will go further on Tuesday
and push for early elections after she meets with her party leaders. As is
often the case with Ms. Banerjee, her public statements are often
contradictory.
“We are not supporting
these anti-people decisions,” she posted on her Facebook account on Friday. “We
are very much serious about these developments and ready to take hard decisions
if these issues are not reconsidered.” But the next day, she announced several
times at a rally: “We don’t want to topple the government.”
The 15 months of her
administration in West Bengal, of which Kolkata, also known as Calcutta, is the
capital, demonstrate just how hopeless it is to try to predict how Ms. Banerjee
will behave.
Not long after taking
office, she announced that a rape victim was lying even though the police found
evidence supporting the victim’s allegations. She demanded the arrest of a
farmer after he asked her a question about rising fertilizer prices.
She angrily marched out
of a televised session with college students after accusing those in the
audience of being Maoists. Her government arrested a university professor after
he forwarded an e-mail with a political cartoon criticizing her. She has
claimed that there is a global conspiracy to kill her.
Many are still hopeful
that Ms. Banerjee, who is often referred to here as “Didi” (elder sister), will
be able to reverse her state’s long decline and contribute to India’s
resurgence. But even her allies are beginning to wonder whether her volcanic
temper, off-the-wall statements and increasingly nasty battle with the news
media will be her undoing as chief minister, a position akin to that of a
governor.
“She never picked up the
skills to hold her anger in check so that she can administer and govern,” said
Laveesh Bhandari, director of Indicus, an economic research firm.
And there is a palpable
sense from top ministers in the central government of what seems to be a bad case
of “Mamata fatigue.” When asked about Ms. Banerjee’s impending decision, Renuka
Chowdhury, a spokesman for the Congress Party, the primary group in the
governing coalition, said: “We remain optimistic, while we appreciate her
limitations and compulsions.”
Ms. Banerjee declined
requests for an interview.
In her place, Amit
Mitra, Ms. Banerjee’s finance minister, dismissed the many controversies she
has been involved in as little more than a tempest in a teapot.
“These are concerns only
for the English-speaking upper class,” he said. Referring to the Communists,
known locally as the C.P.M., he added: “The C.P.M. would have beat that farmer
to death. He got away because she believes in democracy.”
Ms. Banerjee is a
polarizing figure. Her opposition to the government plan, which had been
gestating for months, contributed to the near-paralysis of India’s national
government. A survey of chief executives by a leading business newspaper found
that 25 of 50 listed Ms. Banerjee as the single biggest stumbling block to
India’s growth.
But she is still a hero
to many in West Bengal, in part because she remains a powerful symbol of
integrity. In a country rife with political corruption, Ms. Banerjee, who is
single, lives in a home no bigger than a two-car garage and wears inexpensive
cotton saris and rubber flip-flops. Her official car is a compact Hyundai.
She spent decades
fighting a Communist machine that ruled West Bengal for 34 years, and she was
physically beaten many times by party cadres, in one instance barely surviving.
“You had to be crazy to
fight the Communists like she did. Normal people aren’t like that,” said one of
her own ministers, who asked not to be identified for fear of angering Ms.
Banerjee. “Unfortunately, this characteristic now is a huge disadvantage to
her.”
Suzette Jordan became
the subject of one of Ms. Banerjee’s tirades. Ms. Jordan is a divorced mother
of two who was beaten and raped at gunpoint in early February but was so
traumatized that she did not report the crime for several days. When she did
report it, the police failed to investigate until she complained to a newspaper
reporter, after which officers recovered footage from a security camera proving
much of her story. (The New York Times generally does not name victims of sex
crimes, but Ms. Jordan’s case is widely known in West Bengal and she asked that
her name be used.)
In the midst of the
controversy, Ms. Banerjee was asked about the case. “The entire incident has
been concocted with the motive of maligning the government,” she said at the
time. “Everything will be revealed in the course of the investigation.”
Within hours of Ms.
Banerjee’s allegations, Ms. Jordan said her apartment building was surrounded
by an angry mob. “There were thousands of people outside my gates,” she said.
“My daughters were terrified and my mom, who was sick with pneumonia, couldn’t
help them. None of my friends could get through the crowd.”
She stayed with friends
until a top female police official announced arrests in the case. Six weeks
later, however, that police official was transferred to a less prestigious job,
a move that provoked another media outcry.
“It is the prerogative
of my government to get the job done by someone who can perform in a better
way,” Ms. Banerjee said when asked about the woman’s transfer. “The manner in
which personal attacks are being made is a conspiracy and a planted game,” she
added.
For all the criticism,
Ms. Banerjee is still popular here, in part because she and Mr. Mitra, her
finance minister, are seen as the best hope for reversing West Bengal’s
decades-long decline.
In a lengthy interview
in his office, Mr. Mitra noted that a stubborn Maoist insurgency in the state
had cooled since Ms. Banerjee took office, and he predicted that industry would
soon flock to West Bengal.
“Mamata Banerjee’s
biggest calling card to industry is that there is now no one to bribe,” Mr.
Mitra said.
At the same time,
however, Ms. Banerjee, who opposed forceful land acquisitions by the previous
government, refuses to use the state’s power of eminent domain to obtain land
for industrial plants. In a nation where obtaining even small plots of land can
lead to years of legal wrangling, some industrialists said that such a refusal
was deadly to West Bengal’s economic prospects.
“If they’re not going to
help you obtain even one speck of land, how are you going to manage it?” asked
Aniruddha Lahiri, president of the Chatterjee Group, which has a large
petrochemical plant in West Bengal.
Still, Sumit Mazumder,
chairman of TIL Limited, a heavy equipment manufacturer, said he is more
optimistic about West Bengal’s prospects. “Mamata is a very determined lady,”
he said, “and it’s the determined people who get things done.”
Hari Kumar contributed reporting from Kolkata
and New Delhi.
This article has been
revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: September
18, 2012
An earlier version of this article misstated the
representation of Mamata Banerjee’s regional party in India’s Parliament. The
party has 19 representatives in Parliament; not all the representatives are
ministers.
