[Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party spent heavily, going after the same villages and districts she once swung against the communists and enlisting political operatives once allied to her to dig up dirt and personal attacks.]
By
Mujib Mashal
 |
|
West
Bengal’s chief minister, Mamata Banerjee, delights in addressing crowds, like
this one marking Eid al-Adha in Kolkata, India, this month. Credit
Rebecca Conway for
The New York Times
|
KOLKATA,
India — To topple 34 years
of communist rule and become chief minister in India’s West Bengal state,
Mamata Banerjee put her life on the line for decades.
She built a vast grass-roots base, held
hunger strikes and sit-ins that were attacked by the police and jumped back
into street protests soon after communist workers bashed her head with metal
rods.
So when Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s
governing party targeted such a proven survivor, campaigning hard in her state
in the parliamentary elections this year, it pulled out all the stops.
Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party spent
heavily, going after the same villages and districts she once swung against the
communists and enlisting political operatives once allied to her to dig up dirt
and personal attacks.
The result was 18 seats for the B.J.P. in a
state where it had just two before — and a political feud with Ms. Banerjee’s
Trinamool party that has become increasingly deadly.
Political workers on both sides have been
found hanged, slashed, shot or burned to death, with the B.J.P. saying most of
the recent deaths have fallen on its side.
Ms. Banerjee, 64, whose supporters call her
“didi” (elder sister) and who cherishes her image as a street fighter, has not
backed down.
The Bengal police force she commands turned
water cannons and tear gas against thousands of B.J.P. protesters over the past
week. The clashes have become a display of how personal, vicious and violent
India’s politics can get.
Even former friends have become weapons in
West Bengal.
Among those whom the B.J.P. enlisted early in
its fight against Ms. Banerjee was Dipak Ghosh, 81. He was one of the earliest
members of her party and spent more than a decade at her side.
From a small desk in his second-floor study,
Mr. Ghosh dictates letter after letter obsessively trying to punch holes in Ms.
Banerjee’s narrative.
“Sir,” Mr. Ghosh wrote to Ms. Banerjee’s
secretariat in 2012, inquiring about the affairs in her residence. “Since she
is commonly known as a spinster and sir her mother died a few months back, who,
besides personal maids and servants, live in that house?”
“Madam,” he wrote in another letter just two
weeks later, addressed to the chief minister herself. “I humbly invite you to
take a virginity test.”
For her part, Ms. Banerjee frequently used
campaign rallies to go after Mr. Modi, saying she wanted to give Mr. Modi “a
tight slap of democracy” and “throw Modi out of the country.”
Nor did she spare the personal life of the
prime minister, who left his wife for politics soon after an arranged marriage
decades ago: “He can’t take care of his wife, but he will take care of
Indians?”
Mr. Modi, a masterful orator who has listed
drama among his favorite school subjects, pressed Ms. Banerjee’s buttons at
every opportunity.
“Didi, O Mamata didi!” he said at one rally,
slowing his words as he savored his response. “Your slap will be a blessing for
me.”
Mr. Modi’s party took advantage of an opening
largely handed to it by Ms. Banerjee herself: Her heavy-handed crushing of the
communist opposition, her alienation of longtime allies and suspicions of
corruption of those around her are being successfully used against her now.
Rising from a modest background, Ms. Banerjee
took decades to build a large grass-roots base. Many of her supporters liked
that she was a front-line fighter, and as she took risks, they would, too.
(All the while, Ms. Banerjee managed to
publish 87 books in her name and create more than 5,000 paintings. The painter
and competition judge Debasish Chowdhury called her art “a tragedy for the
Kolkata arts community.”)
But when she reached power in 2011, her party
turned victory into an opportunity to obliterate old foes. Critics say her
control of the state police meant protection for the party as it snatched
communist offices and threatened candidates in local elections. Her rule became
increasingly autocratic.
During the parliamentary elections this
spring, the B.J.P. promised the communists protection, and won a large share of
their vote in return. It was a remarkable development, because leftist leaders
had previously described any alliance with the Hindu nationalist B.J.P. as akin
to jumping from the frying pan into the fire.
“Where the Communist Party could give shelter
to their workers, they still fought as communists. Where the party couldn’t
give shelter, they joined the B.J.P.,” said Sovandeb Chattopadhyay, 74, a
minister in Ms. Banerjee’s state government and a founding member of her party.
Mr. Chattopadhyay made clear that he meant it
was his own party’s violence they needed shelter from.
“Yeah,” he said. “No doubt about it.”
The cycle of revenge has created a tense
situation in local communities. In Duttapukur, a suburb of Kolkata, the
B.J.P.’s rise has given the crushed communists some breathing space — to regain
the offices snatched by Ms. Banerjee’s governing party and to push back against
the kind of intimidation that meant no one dared contest it in most of the area
during last year’s local vote.
Mr. Chattopadhyay, the minister, said it was
a case of party workers not following the leadership’s example. Critics,
though, say the workers exactly follow Ms. Banerjee’s lead: She rarely minces
words or appears tolerant.
When B.J.P. supporters began heckling her
convoy in a Kolkata suburb last month, Ms. Banerjee jumped out of her car to
face them down.
“I will skin you!” she shouted in a
confrontation caught on video. “Write down the names. Search the whole
locality, house by house. How dare you!”
Mr. Ghosh joined Ms. Banerjee’s party soon
after retiring as a civil servant in the 1990s. As a close political adviser,
he was central to her 2011 victory to become chief minister in the state, with
a population just short of 100 million.
In return, she had promised to nominate him
for a local assembly seat. The rupture between them emerged when Ms. Banerjee announced
the name of one Dipak on the candidate list, just not Dipak Ghosh.
The B.J.P. decided to contest local elections
vigorously in West Bengal last year. While it did not make many inroads then,
the party’s willingness to sacrifice effort, cash and even personnel — around
45 B.J.P. supporters are thought to have been killed in political violence in
that season — made an impression on the state’s voters that it was here to
stay, Mr. Ghosh said.
“I don’t think she realized it fully,” Mr.
Ghosh said of the B.J.P. threat. “They gave blood.”
Even Ms. Banerjee’s critics characterize her
as a hard-working and seemingly tireless fighter.
She is in her element on the streets and at
rallies, arriving in her trademark white sari, wearing white flip-flops, her
hands clasped in respect. Then she grabs the microphone, pacing the stage left
and right.
“She knows how to connect with the common
man,” said Debasish Bhattacharya, who runs a magazine supported by Ms.
Banerjee’s party. “She has fought against the odds throughout her life. But
this is a much bigger fight, and she has also become older. This will be a
tougher fight.”
