Mamata Banerjee has to figure out how she wants to lead West Bengal. Will she allow the anarchy-like situation to continue, while she harvests votesIJ
As an unassailable measure of popularity, there is nothing to beat a free and fair election. Any contamination of the process of electing representatives calls into question the integrity of the outcome. By that reckoning, the West Bengal panchayat election of 2013 will go down as a badly corrupted process, starting with the bizarre bickering between the State Election Commission and the State Government over dates, security arrangements, deployment of Central security forces and finally the strange reluctance of the administration to act on the direction of the SEC.
Imperative as it may be for Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee to fulfil her vow to rid West Bengal of her enemy number one, the CPI(M), and pack the Congress off to oblivion, the methods employed to convince the voters that there is no alternative to the Trinamool Congress have torn to shreds the credibility of the process. This has catapulted a political insignificant Anubrata Mandal of Birbhum, Trinamool Congress's district president, into a nationally notorious figure. The violence he preached as the approved method of installing the Trinamool Congress as the only politically acceptable representative of the people on his turf — beat, burn, bomb, if need be even the police — to do so without receiving even the mildest rap from his leader has corrupted the election process beyond repair.
Credibility is essential for people to keep faith with Ms Banerjee. Her personal triumph in ejecting the CPI(M) from power after 34 years was based on the smooth, peaceful and pristine process of election in 2011. So was her remarkable resurrection of 2009, when the Trinamool Congress overtook the CPI(M) in the number of Members of Parliament it sent to the lok Sabha.
It may well be that on July 29, when the ballots are counted, the Trinamool Congress will triumph, once again. It may well be that the party will control all 17 districts through the top tier of the panchayats. But the victory will stink of the muck that went before, including over 25 deaths during the election process and another 15 while the uncertainty over dates extended the campaign beyond the usual three to four weeks.
The 2013 panchayat election will go down as a campaign of unquotable quotes. The language was often unparliamentary to the point that the media had to present sanitised versions of it for the public to know the tone and tenor of the campaign. The hallmark Ms Banerjee style of speaking in the idiom of the masses turned into a campaign that used the language of anti-socials to communicate with the people. Implicit in this is the assumption, that the people being addressed by the Trinamool Congress campaigners were somehow a class apart.
It is a mistake to believe that public memory is notoriously short. The public will remember that the panchayat election of 2013 was contaminated by, in hindsight, inexplicable brawls between the State Government, especially Ms Banerjee and the SEC. When Mr Mukul Roy, Ms Banerjee's right hand man, warned the SEC that conducting the polls in the peak of summer would result in deaths and threatened to carry the dead to the SEC office to demand justice on behalf of the people, he should have realised that accountability does not begin and end with Ms Mira Pande. He and his leader are accountable for the deaths that have converted the election into a tragedy instead of a celebration of decentralisation and democracy.
It has been easy for Ms Banerjee, till now, to blame the CPI(M) or the Congress, for instigating and indulging in violence. But Mr Mandal has made sure that she cannot with credibility blame the other side any more. And Mr Mandal is not the only Trinamool Congress who preached strong arm methods; there were others. Whether he inspired them to their excesses or they realised that to be noticed in the campaign they would have to outdo the Birbhum hero is a matter of debate.
Presiding over this terrain of violence, Ms Banerjee has to figure out how she wants to lead West Bengal. Will she lead it out of the ‘anarchy’ that has been created or will she allow the situation to continue, while she harvests her votes and positions herself as a claimant in the 2014 general electionIJ