Will Mamata's star keep rising on national stage?

West Bengal’s effervescent chief minister Mamata Banerjee might have many faults but faint-heartedness is not one of them. Like the intrepid buffalo wading unmindfully into the murkiest of waters, Ms Banerjee plunges in where most fear to venture, often creating, in the process, the most noticeable of splashes. As a young Congress student leader in the mid-1970s, she is said to have shot into prominence by dancing on the bonnet of the socialist leader Jayaprakash Narayan’s car as a mark of protest. Today, she is in national focus having become the chief opponent of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s demonetisation move. The four-decade-long journey from student leader to a principal national Opposition figure is a huge achievement by any standards. Today, few will deny that she is part of the national political scene, no matter whether she is liked or abhorred. Yet, today, Ms Banerjee is also at a crossroads: which way will her political destiny fork?

While analysts might doubt her abilities, it is unlikely that the doughty lady herself would have the slightest reservations. After all, it was not self-doubt that contributed to her spectacular political rise in a Bengal once dominated by the unrelenting shadow of the political Left. As the Congress Party in her state, dominated by opportunistic local leaders, crumbled in the 1980s, Ms Banerjee climbed into the vacant chair of principal Opposition leader in West Bengal. From 1984 onwards she won virtually every electoral contest she participated in and rose rapidly in the Congress Party. In 1997, she broke away to launch her own party, the All-India Trinamul Congress, which rapidly grew into the main Opposition party in Left-dominated West Bengal. Ms Banerjee’s political career too continued to soar and she came into national focus by becoming railway minister twice and holding other important portfolios in the Central government.

Her crowning glory, and one that will be remembered for a very long time in her home state, was her stunning electoral victory in the 2011 state Assembly polls. The Marxists had controlled West Bengal for nearly three and a half decades and over the years created an iron framework of corruption and control, which was purported to be invincible. Ms Banerjee’s massive victory demolished that myth and the CPI(M)’s political base. As a political leader, who had risen from very difficult circumstances, Ms Banerjee always favoured the downtrodden and ceaselessly championed their cause. This made her a mass leader as well as an unbridled populist. But there was a downside to it. Her destructive type of populism resulted in West Bengal’s deindustrialisation, increase in organised extortion and rural underemployment. Her political victory has come at a huge cost to her state’s economic development.

The country’s political stars have, however, continued to favour Ms Banerjee. The gradual but continued emasculation of the country’s largest political party, the Congress, has created a vast nationwide political vacuum which the country’s fragmented and jaded Opposition leaders are unable to fill. Ms Banerjee, on the other hand, seems to view this as her chance and has used every opportunity to criticise, chastise and ridicule the ruling dispensation headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a bid to emerge as the country’s principal Opposition leader. The portents are not good though. Her call for Opposition unity on the demonetisation issue has largely failed and forced her to return to the umbrella offered by her erstwhile political mentor, the Congress Party. Ms Banerjee’s claim that demonetisation is anti-poor and an assault on the people has not been supported by any other chief minister except Arvind Kejriwal, another incorrigible Modi-baiter.

The Janata Dal family has largely stayed out of the debate as have most other national-level politicians, leaving Ms Banerjee holding the bat. Her stance on the field is somewhat shaky. She was kicked in the shin by the Marxists after she had publicly declared she was ready to shed ideological differences with them over the demonetisation issue. The Marxists refused to oblige, saying they would not help her save crores in illegal funds amassed by her party. She has also earned nationwide opprobrium by opposing the arrest of Tamil Nadu’s chief secretary who was found with millions in unaccounted cash, gold and much more. The rising instances of corruption charges against her ministers, her hysterical opposition to demonetisation and her defence of the corrupt has lost her middle-class support in her home state and rendered her a figure of much ridicule elsewhere. At this juncture, Ms Banerjee can only hope that the trajectory of her political career will not follow that of one-time Bihar strongman, Lalu Prasad Yadav, who did rise to the national stage, sadly not as a statesman but as a buffoon.