The Economic Times, 4 Feb, 2012
For one busy single-handedly bringing down Bengal’s Left citadel all her political life, Mamata Banerjee has managed to write quite a bit. “Writing,” she writes, “is my way of recording my conscience,” and at times, an attempt “to come face to face with another me, to rediscover my other self”.
By now, her political opponents must have found one Didi quite a handful to really appreciate another. For the rest of us, however, the idea that there may be more to the shrill, headstrong and unpredictable political phenomenon that is Mamata Bannerjee is somewhat comforting. But a few pages into her memoir – My Unforgettable Memories – the first account of ‘duality’ dashes such hope.
Mamata reveals that she has two birthdays. She was underage (not even 15) when she wrote her school final exams and her father “gave a fictitious age and birthday” so that she was not disqualified. As a result, she writes, five years were added to her age. For average readers, this raises two questions.
Why did Mamata’s father add five years to her age when a year, at the most two, would have made her eligible for the exam? Perhaps Banerjee senior was gifted with unusual foresight. But for the five years added to her ‘real age’ of 24, Mamata would not have been even eligible to contest Lok Sabha polls when she was elected from Jadavpur in 1984. In retrospect, could that still be a cognizable offence?
It is, of course, possible that Mamata, who was mature enough to take charge as the state general secretary of Mahila Congress at 16 (or 21), had no inkling that her age was being doctored at school when she was 15 (or 20). So she hopes she will not attract criticism for “disclosing the truth”, though, she writes in another context, “there are some who dismiss anything I do as drama”. Momentarily disarmed, perhaps guilty, most readers will move on. Anyway, India does not need another birthday bashing, not just yet.
The search for the “other Mamata” soon leads to her deep belief in the occult and the supernatural – the rain that preceded her birth and has since kept company “almost like a dear friend” on all significant occasions; the repeated apparition of her father’s spirit before her mother and herself; goddess Kali communicating through her younger brother who suffered a violent seizure, or by appearing in her dreams, even making photo frames fly across her room.
In between pop out curious nuggets about the child who got lost wandering outside her house and was brought back by the local police, a very promising beginning of a complex relationship that would slide steadily downhill during the Left rule before getting turned on its head by the historic regime change; about the debutant MP who felt “both lost and defeated” by “the conspiracy” that made her “seem like an illiterate person who could not even sign her name”; about the reluctant leader “not used to speaking English”, for who travelling abroad is “an ordeal”.
In a country where women politicians must come as amma, behenji or in unquestionable saffron, Didi boldly pens the word ‘boyfriend’ in her memoir. Once she was with her classmates who decided to meet ‘their friends’ on way back from school. They reached a park and met a couple of boys. When Mamata’s friends owned them up as their boyfriends, she was so scared that she ran back home. ”I did not even know what the word ‘boyfriend’ meant and could not ask anyone. What of people misunderstood? What would they think of me?” No, she did not specify how old she was then or if her response to the idea of ‘boyfriend’ did evolve with time.
That is not the only omission in Mamata’s memoir. She joined politics in 1970 when the Naxal movement took root in Bengal. The political turmoil that cost hundreds of lives does not merit any mention in her account. Mamata writes endearingly about her feat of planting a black flag on then Prime Minister Morarji Desai’s car but deftly skirts the issue of the Emergency and its excesses. She was, of course, upset that Indira Gandhi had lost but “back then I was still a novice and I did not understand the larger political world well enough to grasp the reasons for the poll debacle”. The memoir is also conveniently silent about her years in the NDA government (though in another context she slips in that AB Vajpayee “has always been very fond of me”).
But the bold, even brash, Mamata returns in her many scathing references to Priya Ranjan Dasmunsi, the “big brother” who “lost the 1991 Lok Sabha elections from Howrah”. Sonia Gandhi (the reluctant “Queen Mother”) and Manmohan Singh (who did “only the CPM’s bidding”) are not spared. Even Indira Gandhi comes in for criticism when, referring to a change of attitude in 1983, she slams the prevalent Congress culture that made the top leadership “immediately censor” any regional faction that got “too active”.
The memoir reserves the most emotional bits for Rajiv Gandhi. The assassination of her biggest mentor shattered Mamata. “I was orphaned all over again, for the second time in my life since my father’s death. I did not speak to anybody for a week. I simply could not eat a morsel. I used to shut myself up in my room and cry. It has been so many years, but even today, I feel his presence in every step I take; he touched a chord that still plays the symphony of my life.”
Left to fend for herself politically, Mamata, who carried a “feeling of not fitting in” since her school days, gradually hardened into a loner. The memoir details each attack on her by Left goons and the police, and the prolonged tale of serial betrayals within the Congress. In the mid-90s, Mamata would frequently lose sleep at night, spend hours looking at her father’s photo and ask him: “Why? Why did I have to get into this dirty game of politics?” Of course, she would return, each time, to “fight injustice”, all by herself.
Today, if a control-freak Mamata barely trusts anyone with responsibility or power, the early signs were obvious. While registering her party secretly in 1998, her idea was that “the right hand should not know what the Left hand does”. During her 26-day fast against Singur land acquisition in Kolkata, she was “terrified that instead of medical help”, the doctors “handpicked by the administration…would actually do something to disable me temporarily or permanently”.
While much of the memoir is penned by Mamata, the rebel, a brief epilogue is written by Mamata, the chief minister. The Left is vanquished but the perennial victim in her still feels easily wronged. So she snubs those ‘friends’ who are critical of her new government and reminds them that they were last-minute entrants in the anti-Left movement that she single-handedly built, “from Canning to Kanchenjunga”, over three decades. Credit appropriated, perhaps duly, she goes on to warn the slanderous “CPM touts, the enemies of the people”: “It is not possible to swim against the flow when a river is in spate.”
At one point of this rant of an epilogue, she suddenly goes on a baffling tangent: “Even small disjointed movements have yielded the Nobel Prize for some people simply because they know how to lobby hard. Yet, Bengal and her grassroots movement for Ma, Mati, Manush remain totally neglected.” The prize committee at Stockholm may not take note, but this salvo is likely to confuse Didi’s supporters who were given to believe so far that the Centre’s reluctance to offer an economic bailout was the biggest snub for Bengal.
But will this memoir help or damage Didi’s political image? Neither, since Mamata is a natural mass leader like no other in Bengal and very few elsewhere. On that August noon in 1997, when she dwarfed the Congress plenary session held at an indoor stadium by filling up Kolkata’s biggest ground with lakhs of supporters, I was among those who managed a foothold on the back of her stage to get a measure of the crowd.
A rookie reporter from Delhi, I remember the awe and bewilderment in the eyes of the national press that was matched only by the reaction of the Congress leadership nervously confabulating just a mile away. That was Mamata’s first step towards Trinamool Congress. Irrespective of her quirks and qualities, she found her way with the masses long before she became the chief minister.
Yes, most Mamata baiters will find this memoir a delicious read. But so will the devout. “For those who believe, no proof is needed,” writes Mamata of the supernatural, “for those who do not, no proof is enough.”
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