There's Method in her Mamata-ness

Mamata Banerjee's seemingly illogical walk out of UPA is actually a high-stakes bet. She's betting on the average Bengali's phobia of capital & enterprise, on stealing the Left's 'pro-poor' thunder & on next elections producing a hopelessly hung Parliament   

The Economic Times, 23 September, 2012

The last ten days could have shaken India. They did not. The suspense is over for now and we are handed a scorecard too happy to be real. End of the day, every player emerges a winner without anybody having to lose.

The government is safe. The Congress hopes that the decision to push reforms and, more importantly, resist rollbacks will improve its negative ratings. More importantly, the UPA gets rid of an ally that has been stretching it possibly more than the Opposition could.

On her part, Mamata Banerjee finally demonstrates that she can also bite and promptly anoints herself a tigress. In doing so, she steals the pro-people thunder from the Left while clearing the way for the Trinamool Congress to fight the state Panchayat polls without having to suffer a scam-tainted Congress. She also escapes political guilt because the government survives.

The BJP gets to make all the right noises and is relieved to have avoided an immediate mid-term poll that would have tested its preparedness. The Samajwadi Party gains key leverage and the power to decide -- with an eye on the Bahujan Samaj Party -- when to opt for the polls. Mayawati, likewise, gets to wait and watch how incumbency plays out in Uttar Pradesh. The same is true for J Jayalalithaa and her AIADMK. Even Nitish Kumar comes clean on his openness to fair bidding for Bihar’s sake.

But is this for real?

+++

Mamata’s national politics is part of her Bengal strategy. She knows that an average Bengal voter is a Left stereotype. It is customary to attach an element of intellectualism traditionally associated with Left ideologies to the people in states that have a history of Communist movements. On ground, however, much of Left dialectics has long been reduced to Left morality.

In Bengal, this Left morality has been fed by decades of popular culture that idolise struggle (not of classes but merely getting by in life) and penury (not as a challenge but a badge of integrity). This restricts the bhadrolok’s default expression of anti-establishmentarianism to a phobia, not scrutiny, of capital and enterprise. Over time, it has degenerated into a misplaced disregard for authority and subsequent loss of work culture. Worse, this self-defeating order is perpetuated by an aversion to change of any kind.

The first Indian state where computer became a household term was Bengal. Not that most Bengalis ever saw one in glass and plastic in the early 1980s, but an aggressive campaign by trade unions backed by the Jyoti Basu government educated them about “the job-eating monster bred by western imperialism”. Last year, an ISO 9001:2008 certified computer literacy programme was named Jyoti Basu Computer Saksharta Mission.

Whether Bengal will think tomorrow what much of India thinks today has not come in the way of Mamata’s assessment of her voters and paying the Left back in its devalued coins. She has been mastering this craft for nearly three decades, cultivating symbolism of that very Left morality. Her ordinary sarees, rubber slippers, country accessories and shrill rhetoric only reinforce her street fighter image of a perennial struggler. Her party, after all, is packed with former Left cadre or their equivalents.

In 1977, when the Left came to power in Bengal, the feudal, anachronistic Congress leadership was replaced by a new order that was subaltern and contemporary. An inevitable but violent land reform drive cemented the Left base in rural Bengal. But to capture the urban space, the party employed thousands of cadres in mills, schools and offices across the state.

Once the benefits of land reform wore off, successive generations demanded fresh incentives for backing the party. So one-third of government spending was routed through panchayats. Such complete disregard to merit in appointments and tenders soon reduced governance to a joke. This culture of political reward is so embedded in Bengal that the non-beneficiaries of the Left Front’s power network quickly cast their lot with Mamata.

Therefore, unlike 1977, the Trinamool victory in 2011 was no triumph of an alternative politics. It was merely a realignment of forces within a political equilibrium that both draws from and feeds a larger social decadence. Mamata has always played by Bengal’s established rules. On FDI, a pet issue with the Left since the early years of liberalisation, she has again trumped her arch rival in its own game.

It worked and how. Even former CPI-M minister Abdur Rezzak Mollah has offered her “blue salute” (instead of the customary red salute of the Left) for withdrawing support to the “anti-people UPA” government.

+++

Yet, Mamata’s Bengal mandate also includes the aspiration of a large section of restive young voters hungry for jobs and opportunities. The state economy is in tatters and immediately needs massive investment in infrastructure. Mamata inherited empty coffers and the early euphoria over the ouster of the Left would have allowed her government to take a few tough decisions to raise funds. Instead, she even scrapped the water tax her predecessor Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee had levied under the Centre’s Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission.

Ever since, Mamata has been dealing in symbolism that costs nothing: the law to return Singur land to farmers; the visits to Darjeeling and Sikkim; the tough posturing on Teesta waters; generating headlines on Jangalmahal and Gorkhaland; and opposing “anti-poor policies” of the UPA. If she was buying time till a bailout package arrived from the centre, that wait is over.

In fact, former finance minister Pranab Mukherjee’s elevation to the Rashtrapati Bhawan drastically reduced her chances of securing an economic package for the state. Mamata was finding it hard to explain her failure to extract the concessions from a government she belonged to. Now that she has quit the alliance on grounds that have many takers in Bengal, she hopes to garner some sympathy for her financial handicap.

It is unlikely though that she will be able to cite the so-called betrayal by the centre to stave off popular disenchantment for too long. She was not elected chief minister on a central undertaking and remains accountable for her failure to fix the fiscal mess in Bengal. Mamata has already whiled away the first one and a half years, considered a new government’s honeymoon period with voters, in banal populism. She will not risk harsh measures in the run up to the 2014 Lok Sabha polls. That leaves her with a really tight window to enforce some fiscal discipline.

Her last week’s show will only make attracting capital more difficult for her government. Amit Mitra, Bengal’s finance minister, did his years at FICCI and should know a thing or two about investor sentiment. If lack of infrastructure, loss of work ethics, a history of popular hostility towards capital and political whimsicality were not enough, now he will have his chief minister’s public posturing to contend with.

+++

Only 23 hours ahead of the Trinamool ministers formally leaving the UPA, the party website removed its 2009 election manifesto that, in paragraph 42, endorsed large domestic and foreign capital in retail trade. Mamata explained the contradiction by claiming that the online document was only a draft. But the inconsistency, if not the hypocrisy, is exposed.

In the last two decades, a range of political parties have attacked many facets of liberalisation that has triggered unprecedented growth, created jobs and also increased poverty in the country. In these 20 years, all political parties, including the Left, have been in power at the Centre or part of a ruling coalition. None of the governments deviated from the path of liberalisation. P Chidambaram himself was the finance minister (from Tamil Maanila Congress) in the United Front government during 1996-1998. The NDA even sought to decontrol fuel price in 2002.

Since India was not doing particularly well in the four decades before liberalisation and was on the verge of bankruptcy when reforms became the only choice, reverting to the old economy cannot be anybody’s case. But while criticizing policies of liberalisation for its many legitimate and imaginary deficiencies, not a single political party has offered a concrete economic alternative. The CPI-M is an exception but Bengal bears testimony to why few take such prescriptions seriously.

Policies can and should be debated. For example, even the Prime Minister’s argument that a state is free to decide for itself but not for others glosses over the fact that any potential impact of FDI in retail – displacement of surplus and unemployed agricultural labour, for example – may spill over to affect other states and eventually the entire country. Then again, certain experts have pointed out how the share of organised retail is unlikely to exceed 25-30% even after FDI and pose any real danger to small businesses.

But rarely, if ever, our politicians have debated the pros and cons of reform beyond clichéd rhetoric which is based more on perception than facts. In fact, there is an alarming dearth of data because successive governments have not bothered to commission enough independent studies or field assessments to evaluate the outcome of their policies. It only reflects the insincerity and convenience of the debate.

The criticism of reforms has long become the obligation of the Opposition and the compulsion of the communists and the socialists. Mamata is only a newly added spoke of this noisy wheel.

+++

So why was the Trinamool chief the only one to act on her threat?

On paper, she banks heavily on Muslim votes and is unlikely to join hands with the BJP. She cannot be part of a third front because that would require aligning with the Left. It is unlikely that Mulayam will ditch the Left to join a potential alliance of Jaya-Nitish-Naveen-Mamata which on its own will not be able to muster the numbers (and will be anyway jeopardized by too many prime ministerial aspirants). So hasn’t Mamata forfeited her say in Delhi by severing ties with the Congress?

The Congress, in fact, should worry as much. In spite of the success in pushing through the current set of reforms, the party may not benefit at all. The FDI in retail will take years to benefit the economy. The fuel price hike has only taken off a fraction of the subsidy burden. The harsh measures will irk the voters who may not see any tangible benefit by 2014. If the Congress goes it alone in Bengal, it is unlikely that any of its five MPs from the state will return to the House.

Mulayam should also be worried. The fast deteriorating law and order situation in Uttar Pradesh has already dented his dream of leading a 40-strong group of MPs in Parliament in 2014. Given the anti-Congress sentiment and the disorder within the BJP, Mayawati may be the likely beneficiary of an SP slide if Akhilesh fails to firm up governance.

To Mamata, her decision makes perfect political sense. This was her best opportunity to dump the dwindling stock of the Congress and deny the Left the pro-poor plank. In the 2014 polls, unless the Congress delivers a performance miracle in the next few months or Mamata accelerates on the path of fiscal disaster, she believes she will benefit by going it alone and concede fewer seats than she would have to in an alliance with the Congress.

Of course, it will depend on her ability to buy time with her voters with innovative show of symbolism, to milk her tigress image and reinforce it through opportunistic posturing from time to time, and restrain herself from slipping into those bouts of self-destructive madness when she gets just anyone arrested. Given her record, the first two are not big asks really.

If she can indeed walk the tightrope till the 2014 polls, she should harvest enough MPs to try what Nitish attempted last week. Only, she will have too many potential takers during government formation in what will presumably be a hung House. Mamata will go with anyone, the Congress included, who gives her a very special Bengal package. Special enough for her to lavish sops on her voters till she gets to retain Bengal for another five years in 2016.

The nation can wait.