Didi's absurdist 'Ekla Cholo' governance

Whichever way one looks at Tuesday’s events in Kolkata, Didi has lost control. The agitations, demanding that she step down, took a violent turn, with police responding to protesters toppling barricades by letting loose lathis, water cannons and tear gas. As always with the Mamata Banerjee administration, fault will be found elsewhere – ‘political elements’ entering the fray. To which one can well respond, ‘Why shouldn’t they?’ But a chief minister barricading herself in her own backyard tells its own story. No amount of ‘chappal’ populism can spin this storming of Versailles.

The anger and frustration of agitators against how the administration has been dealing with the RG Kar rape-murder is palpable, and understandable. To add insult to injury, Didi’s attempts to coopt the agitation has been staggering. Banerjee appears to believe that she can ride out this latest crisis by being both establishment and anti-establishment at the same time. And there lies the nub of the problem facing Bengal‘s citizenry seeking genuine change in the way it’s governed when the voting-out option isn’t anywhere near in sight.

Didi’s street-fighting, browbeating politics has always been seen by her admirers as her ‘offensive charm’. She has, in fact, continued this ‘oppositional’ style of politics over the last 13 years in government. Now, it has suddenly been exposed as the only tool in her box. The current partyless/all-parties protests aren’t part of any political textbook she knows. In Satyajit Ray’s allegorical film, Hirak Rajar Deshe, the despotic king joins protesters to pull down his own statue – he knows no other course of action but agitation. Didi’s call for a ‘counter-agitation’ – against what? – seems no less absurd than Ray’s fiction.