One of the welcome additions to Kolkata in the last two years is a swanky and attractive airport. It is a pleasure to disembark in the new terminal that seems even more appealing because there are so few passengers. However, I did not want to be unnecessarily churlish in my thought process. Real Kolkata hits the visitor when the taxi, in which he or she is travelling, leaves the airport complex. The old capital of the country under the Raj has an overcrowded thoroughfare (masquerading as “VIP” Road) that connects the airport to the main city. For a large portion of the journey into town, the road is surrounded, sometimes on both sides, by old fish ponds (known as “pukur” in Bangla) that emit a stench that overpowers even the staunchest nostrils. Added to that is the blast from the garbage that is strewn around on most Kolkata roads after random gaps. No other Indian metropolis will present a similar experience, not even mini-metros like Pune, Bhopal etc.
After this appalling assault on your pulmonary arteries and olfactory nerve, comes the attack on your mind and sensitivity. Two grand arches, one after the other, on both sides of the road, elaborately designed and crafted, with pictures of a beaming Mamata Banerjee, convey greetings and bon voyage messages to Haj pilgrims on their outward and return journeys. During my stay in the city later on, I asked around and not a single person could recall similar efforts for pilgrims leaving for Vaishno Devi, Kumbh Mela, Prayag, Golden Temple etc. A cynical old acquaintance, with whom I discussed this issue during my stay, airily dismissed the matter by saying that we should be thankful that the message on the arches is written in Bangla. As of now. In a few years, it will be in Urdu. This is Bengali intellectual thinking at its witty worst, and that is one of the problems at the heart of the entire canvas, as I will discuss later.
Mamata’s grand march to Writers Building (the ornate headquarters of the Bengal Government) was to a very large extent fuelled by the Bangla bhadralok and bhadramahila, the social group that was instrumental in throwing out the British Empire from our country and indeed from this part of the world. Make no mistake – this is one enormous achievement that no amount of intellectual revisionism by various “scholars” can sweep under the carpet. 150 years of glorious achievement and work have now been besmirched. One can talk endlessly about the 37 years of misrule and misgovernment by the CPM – Left Front lot (and it was disastrous, I assure you), but the present TMC regime is clearly the product of an abysmal self-goal, as a result of which the Bengalis, led by their intellectual brigade, threw the baby out along with the bathwater. No apologies for mixing metaphors.
Admittedly, a few thinkers / intellectuals / academics (collectively referred to as buddhijeevis in Bangla), have left the Mamata-TMC camp and this includes the iconic writer Mahasweta Devi and a few others. But this group of lapsed Mamata fans is far too small. The vast majority of the Bengali buddhijeevis and the middle-class/ upper middle-class segments of society are still overtly or covertly siding with Didi. Their patience and tolerance for her shenanigans and subterfuges are endless. It is amazing that Bengali refugees from erstwhile East Pakistan, who were tortured, assaulted, murdered and chased out from their ancestral land and property by Islamist hordes, are turning a blind eye to Mamata’s patronage of extremist Islamist vote banks and her pandering to their incessant demands.
This bizarre Bengali mind-set can be partially explained in terms of the Stockholm syndrome. This behavioural pattern has been studied in depth for many years and the research findings show that people who suffer from this problem are victims of torture and imprisonment who gradually come to identify with, and even admire, their captors and torturers in a desperate, and often unconscious, manner. It is a form of self-preservation and is fairly common in the most psychologically traumatic situations. The effects of this syndrome do not disappear when the crisis ends. In many cases, the victims continue to defend and care about their captors even after they escape captivity. In German concentration camps in World War 2, some of the inmates were discovered to be fans of their SS guards and murderers. There can be no other plausible explanation of the psyche of the Bengali Hindu apart from this framework.
The rest of the Mamata vote-bank, apart from the intellectuals, the middle-class (from the top to the bottom) and the Muslims, consists of the lumpen elements (some of whom overlap with the lower middle-class). Large chunks of this segment were in the CPM-Left Front structure and did a quick conversion from the red to the green brigade. This is the public face of the TMC – the goondas and the thugs who go around terrorising their former comrades in the Left parties, the business classes, the entrepreneurs, the small traders and ordinary citizens who do not share their perverted zeal and world view. Mamata can hardly afford to rein in this murderous lot. Her road to power was crafted by them and they sustain the TMC both financially and with muscle power.
She is on a roller-coaster ride down a steep slope with this demented lot. Even if she wants to, she cannot get out of this train to disaster. There is no magic escape chute for her and her inner-camp, all of them past masters in chicanery and subterfuge. For them to think of development of the State or good governance is a pipe dream. There is not a single industrial project of a respectable size that has been set up or is in the process of being set up in Bengal since she came to power in 2011, with her mantra of poriborton or transformation. Ratan Tata pointed this out during a visit to Kolkata last month and was, of course, spot on. However, his statement caused the state’s Finance Minister Amit Mitra to burst his blood vessel and to attack Ratan Tata in juvenile terminology fit only for street demagoguery.
The only element of Mamata’s election slogan-mongering of poriborton that has been implemented was a maniacal programme of changing the colour of public buildings, road dividers etc from red to blue. This was as demented a political decision as the Roman Emperor Caligula appointing his horse as a Consul or planning to do so. The man was certainly deranged enough to have actually done it; according to the historian Suetonius, Caligula loved his horse Incitatus so much that he gave it a marble stall, an ivory manger and even a house. Another historian Cassius Dio wrote that the servants fed the horse oats mixed with gold flakes.
The parallels with Didi are very close. Her fits of megalomania are such that her inner circle is petrified. It also leads her into making ridiculous statements like converting Calcutta into London. Even worse, she recently took a delegation (that included a few persons charge-sheeted for serious offences) to Singapore to attract investment. The normally-suave Singaporeans gave her due courtesy but fell off their seats in laughter when she confused Bangladesh and Pakistan in one of her speeches.
In one of the unexpected fall-outs of the Saradha scandal, her former aide and confidant Kunal Ghosh has been openly suggesting her complicity. The long arm of the law may eventually catch up with her, but by that time she would have irrevocably ruined Bengal, its culture, civilisation and industry.
N.B. This story is collected from social media by Sri Rishi Bagri.we thaught it as very appropriate in current context so uploading it
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