I/II. http://scroll.in/article/808781/mamata-banerjee-is-the-perfect-realisation-of-the-communists-class-politics-and-their-worst-fears
CLASS POLITICS Mamata Banerjee is the perfect realisation of the Left's class politics – and its worst fears A second term as chief minister for the Trinamool leader is unlikely to blunt the class prejudice she faces. an hour ago Sohini Chattopadhyay Sometime near the close of April, as the punishing election campaign in Bengal wound into its last stretch, a joke on WhatsApp made its way around Kolkata. It showed a picture of a woman scouring dishes on the ground, her sari hitched up to her knees, a pair of conspicuously white hawai chappals visible on her feet. The face of the woman was morphed to show Trinamool Congress chairperson and soon-to-be second time chief minister, Mamata Banerjee. The text read, “After 19 May, let us know if you need help" with the dishes. This alleged joke was forwarded, consumed and shared with glee. It was in response to a comment that Banerjee had made at a rally in Kolkata: “If you think I have done wrong, please give me two slaps. If you say, I am ready to come and wash your dishes too, but it pinches when you call me a thief." The joke here is that Banerjee was viewed as having admitted to what the upper middle class in Kolkata has been saying about her for some years now: She deserves to be a maid. That is her place, no more. What a shame that she holds an important public office, what a shame that she has a mandate to be there. See what happens when you give everyone the right to vote? A WhatsApp message with this morphed photo of Mamata Banerjee did the rounds of Kolkata in April. The text reads: “After 19 May, let us know if you need help [with the dishes].” [Phhoto] A WhatsApp message with this morphed photo of Mamata Banerjee did the rounds of Kolkata in April. The text reads: “After 19 May, let us know if you need help [with the dishes].” Loaded with layers of classism, racism and misogyny, the joke shows how much the middle class disregards the labour that props up its homes, offices, and the economy itself. Witness the panic in any middle class home the day their domestic staff is absent. The difficulty of finding good help is perhaps the most common conversation topic in affluent homes everywhere in India, not only in Bengal. ‘Jhee class’ Class runs through the discourse on Banerjee like a fever of loathing. Or admiration, if you’re looking from the other side. The term used often to describe her in Kolkata today is "jhee class" or maid class. This is a reference that can be heard across class categories, whether in drawing room conversations of the elite, or street banter, for instance, among the security guards at the Alimuddin Street office of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). Interestingly, the term used for Banerjee in the 1990s was paagli, or madwoman. She was the perennial rabble rouser on perpetual dharna outside the Writers’ Building, the West Bengal secretariat. "Now what is she protesting," went the popular discourse. But there was a mote of affection in this. She was seen as unruly, crazy, and funny even – people shook their heads when they spoke of her. That changed when the Trinamool wrested power from the Left in 2011. The shift reflects the belief that Mamata is unfit to rule. She is tolerable as an Opposition leader, but not as the chief minister. We want our ministers elegant and refined, crisp in their Bangla pronunciation and grammar, if not in English too, fully able to pronounce a project and a problem as such, not poject and poblem as Banerjee does. Prejudice in print Not just in the realm of gossip, this class prejudice is visible in the formal public discourse too. The front page of The Telegraph on April 27 attributed the growing support for the Communist Party of India (Marxist)-Congress jote (alliance) to the Trinamool’s lack of culture. “I feel ashamed that Mamata Banerjee is our chief minister,” a CPM supporter was quoted in the piece as saying. “From BC Roy to Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, our leaders were of a certain standard. Bengal was known for its culture. Now we have fallen…” The journalist who wrote the piece reported: “Many people we meet, who invariably insist on remaining anonymous, keep talking of the sharp decline in values and culture over the past five years – never mind the overdose of Rabindrasangeet and the visible sparkle in Calcutta streets that outsiders are wont to admire.” Implicit here is that the Trinamool and its supporters have no civility, no manners. To paraphrase that terrific line from the film Ishqiya: “Hamara culture culture, unka culture servant class.” This isn’t a new sentiment. Almost a decade ago, a report in The Telegraph described how Trinamool MLAs broke the furniture in the Vidhan Sabha as response to news that Mamata Banerjee had been stopped by the police on her way to Singur. The headline said: “Skin Thicker than Teak Table". The article referred to the value of the teak and mahogany furniture, which dated back to the 1940s. Brawls and fisticuffs are common not only in the Indian Parliament but across the world. Rarely is the value of the goods broken mentioned like this. Here, the sentiment was that Trinamool legislators don’t understand the value of fine things. The perfect subaltern Banerjee isn’t the only leader who faces this manner of class distaste in India. In 2009, when Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati, who was then the Uttar Pradesh chief minister, made her interest in the prime minister’s job known, the widespread anxiety in the English-language press was about whether she would be able to speak to international leaders in English. “She has never been seen conversing in English,” said a piece in Rediff.com. “Her Hindi too has the rough edges of the western jat-land." The Times of India speculated that her appeal was limited “considering that the preference of a sizeable section of the population is likely to be for an urbane PM conversant with the intricacies of the economy and international affairs…” The interesting thing, of course, is that Banerjee is not from a Dalit background like Mayawati, or even a non-upper-caste background like Lalu Prasad Yadav of the Rashtriya Janata Dal. She is, in fact, a Brahmin, a Banerjee at that – a Brahmin at the top of the Brahmin hierarchy. But despite her dressing in white handloom saris (as ethnic chic as it gets) and her promotion of Rabindrasangeet, her identity and appeal remain distinctly subaltern. She is the politician mocked for lying about her doctorate degree, her inability to speak refined English or Bangla, her tacky fondness for Bollywood and Tollywood actors. Her distasteful comments on victims of sexual violence – she described the rape of the late Suzette Jordan on Kolkata’s Park Street as sajano ghatona (staged incident) – add to her uncouth reputation. Here is a woman leader who openly expresses misogynistic views. In that sense then, Banerjee’s rise reflects the perfect realisation of the Communists’ determinedly caste-blind class politics. She is the embodiment of the subaltern – the proletariat that the comrades wanted to raise. When she speaks, she speaks the aspirations of not only the Dalit or the non-upper-caste but of every marginalised, under-confident subaltern voice. And she reveals too, the perfect dread of the Communists’ politics coming to fruition. II. http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/mamata-banerjee-west-bengal-election-result-assembly-elections-2016-2809568/ Poison, nectar and a churning Mamata victory is a triumph of a model made by Jayalalithaa, Naveen Patnaik, Nitish Kumar. Here, in a milieu of emphatic “subalternisation”, lumpenisation and empowerment have struck together. Written by Ranabir Samaddar | Published:May 20, 2016 12:01 am The West Bengal assembly election of 2016, won comprehensively by the Trinamool Congress (TMC), involved the deepest dynamics of social divisions and stratification. A noticeable trait was the absence of any positive programme of the CPI(M)-Congress Left-liberal combine, which attempted almost a velvet revolution of the kind seen in Eastern Europe in the late eighties and early nineties: a restorative exercise. In this case, the supposedly great call was for Restoration of Democracy — but none of the parties wanted to talk of social classes. The ruling party claimed it was developing West Bengal, but looked as though it was embarrassed to follow a pro-lower class development policy; the Left-liberal combine avoided references to classes, divisions and programmes — as though it is only through killing politics that the liberal exhortation to democracy wins. No election in West Bengal has been as immersed in logistics as this one. The farther the logistical exercise went, the louder became the liberal call to freedom through law and order and strengthening the state machinery of policing so that citizens could have democracy — as though West Bengal was facing an Emergency, and only massive central paramilitary forces could ensure enjoyment of the fruits of liberty. In this cry for democracy it had to be ensured that nobody raised disturbing questions of land, wage, access to market, food, education, etc. and, in particular, Singur and Nandigram. By suppressing all issues that created faultlines in democracy, democracy had to be brought back to West Bengal, which, we were told, was in a void, or if you like, on the brink of an abyss. To do so, elections had to be regimented, garrisoned, policed, patrolled, monitored, relayed, measured, evaluated, and judged as the war progressed, to finally earn the seal of a “democratic exercise”. How did this idea of being on the brink take hold? To understand that, we have to see how the high intellectuals in Bengal articulated the call for democracy and suppressed the issues of lower classes. They were not happy with their lost authority and injured legitimacy to speak for society, which is undergoing social churning, and which added to the election’s unpredictability. The “subalternisation” of politics has made it less Kolkata- and media-centric, and to that extent, the TMC’s strength was almost proportional to the destitution of power in society. The TMC had never been as organised as the Left Front, and had emerged primarily as a movement — unruly, uncontrolled — and as a subaltern response to the six-decade rule of the political classes. Invariably in this response there was, and is, a degree of lumpenisation and crime, but also an enormous involvement of poor people who saw the TMC as their new protector. The Left had thought of development not only in a highly statist manner, but progressively in a neo-liberal manner too. Upper middle class Kolkata, satiated with the principles of enlightenment, liked it — enjoying both the prestige of the Left and the power of the Right all these years. No wonder they largely supported the Left Front’s industrialisation drive and articulated the cultural contours of a peculiarly left-liberal ideology. The intellectuals could never reconcile to Bengal taking the path of Bihar’s politics. With a new style of functioning, political patronage and way of welfare, questions of caste and social exclusion were being addressed in a manner reminiscent of Bihar from Karpoori Thakur to Nitish Kumar. If the TMC has won despite middle-class disenchantment and upper-class opposition, we can say that a model based on a strong government, marginalised opposition, and a stable, populist, benevolent, autocratic leadership, is generally succeeding. Jayalalithaa, Naveen Patnaik, Nitish and Mamata will all be seen as makers of that model. In the milieu of emphatic “subalternisation”, lumpenisation and empowerment have struck together, almost like poison and nectar that came out of the churning. Stung by reality, the educated in Bengal asked: What is this poriborton that had been promised in 2011? Once again, the similarity between the velvet revolution and the cry for democracy is striking. It began with a delegation of intellectuals — composed of a famous poet, a famous scholar, an actor, and other good Samaritans — presenting a demand for free and fair elections through greater supervision. Their banner was “Save Democracy”. They sought the removal of Chief Electoral Officer Sunil Gupta and Deputy Election Commissioner Sandeep Saxena, and the arrest of several grassroots TMC leaders. Indeed, they set the agenda for the Left and BJP who claimed a lack of democratic ambience — and essentially demanded more guns to save democracy. Around the same time, respected social scientists started appearing on TV and op-ed pages, comparing the chief minister’s style to that of an absolute monarch that had ruined or irreparably damaged democracy. The universal lament was that Bengal was in decline, institutions were in crisis, and only strong-willed, conscientious intellectuals could protect whatever remained of the institutional integrity of Bengal’s education and culture. An ex-finance minister declared that though he was old and infirm, he would crawl on his chest (or belly) to cast his vote against “that lady”. Throughout his op-ed invective he did not mention the name of the person; clearly she did not deserve to be called by her name. Another left intellectual known for his radical past rued that miscreants and hoodlums were now ruling Bengal. The spoken and unspoken appeal in these op-eds was for greater EC presence — more armed forces, more supervision, more patrolling, and more police measures. We should fear an intellectual power that puts society to sleep, does not consult the poorer strata of society, and pleads for development and economic growth without any reference to the lower order. We should fear a society that allows itself to be modelled by those who claim that as producers of ideas, intellectuals are beyond rebuke or critique. The change of 2011 was often presented by the learned classes as a moment of uncertain madness when the people “erred”. Chaos scares the upper classes: hence the discourse of being at the brink, void, decline, ruin, and the consequent cry for democracy. The way this election was conducted showed above all the spectral presence of the poorer classes in the democratic game. It is evident in this discourse why and how the liberals lost the working people. We are witnessing a return to the age of social contradictions and political conflicts, which will increasingly become acute. We are also witnessing a gradual passing over from the politics of intense campaign as the heart of election to a kind of electoral subjectivity that is half-political and half-machinic, born out of entanglements of people, the media as a propaganda machine, supervision machinery, software, and logistics. The strategy of the TMC is to accept this reality and bypass it. It represents the lower classes, yet does not want to emphasise class divisions. Its slogan of development aims at achieving the hegemonic position once attained by the Left. Yet, this rhetoric will be incapable of glossing over social contradictions — first because of its lower-order origin; second, because it thinks the possibilities of development policy are limitless. But there is one more reason why the possibility of a TMC strategy to build hegemony may be limited. It is that while it has dismantled the structure of party-controlled mobilisation that combined centralised and capillary forms of power, the void has created an uncertain brew of social activism, welfarism, encouragement to traditional grassroots institutions like clubs, and the power of local toughs to build votebanks and mobilise the poor when needed — with all of these reinforced by the legitimacy provided by an exceptionally strong leader and development-focused governance. This has resulted, and will continue to result, in the simultaneity of episodic violence and development. The writer is Distinguished Chair, Calcutta Research Group. -- Peace Is Doable -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Green Youth Movement" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/greenyouth. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
