Mamata Banerjee is wrong in using tax-payers’ money to take over the troubled television channels owned by the embattled Saradha Group and its discredited owner
The responsibility of the state and the role of the Government is re-invented everyday as circumstances change. Yet, no matter how fluid circumstances are, the basic structure of the state and the role of the Government cannot be rearranged to serve the entirely temporary fancies of the ruling regime. Since ruling regimes are made up of elected representatives, there is nothing absolute about the power that even the most charismatic of change-makers, including the icon of poriborton, Ms Mamata Banerjee can do.
Questions on the limits to power in a parliamentary democracy that upholds the rule of law is raised over and over again as different regimes at the Centre and in the States test the limits in order to extend it and serve their own purposes. The scams on coal allocation and spectrum allocation, appointments and fiddles, point to the misuse of flexibility and the power of interpretation without accountability to the law that various elected representatives believe to be legitimate entitlements of office. It is possible that the power and authority of the Trinamool Congress supremo is such that there is no one who can tell her that there are limits to what can be done by the Government she leads.
This habit of exercising power regardless of consequences is characteristic. The downgrade of Kolkata from metro city to mofussil status, at least for investors from the United States, in the reckoning of Ambassador Nancy Powell is perhaps a consequence of just such headstrong decision making. Never has Kolkata and West Bengal experienced such a slight to its reputation as a leader as being clubbed with small cities like Durgapur and Siliguri in West Bengal, Raipur in Chhattisgarh has done. Instead of reverting to its glory days as rival to london, Kolkata is now perceived as a small town.
As a template wilfulness marks the Trinamool Congress Government's announcement that funds reserved for use in times of calamity or extraordinary individual distress, namely the Chief Minister's Relief Fund, will be used to provide relief to 168 employees of two television channels owned by the infamous Saradha Group and its boss Sudipto Sen. Equating the distress of the 168 employees who have not received salaries for four months, with the consequences of a natural calamity such as an extreme weather event like Aila or the misery of patient afflicted by a life-threatening medical problem is extending the idea of disaster and the compulsion to mitigate the distress beyond the limits of common sense on the one hand and the role of Government and the State on the other. However strong the desire of the Trinamool Congress Government may be to provide relief to unpaid erstwhile employees of Tara Muzik and Tara News, it does need to question whether it can do so at public expense.
If providing relief to the unpaid and the economically-distressed individual is the policy of the Trinamool Congress Government, then there are lakhs of such victims of the same organisation that owns Tara Muzik and Tara News who could legitimately demand the same benefits. So could other unpaid employees of organisations that have been shut down by the owners claim that they too ought to be paid Rs 15,000 as temporary relief. Such employees could also demand that their organisations should be taken over by the West Bengal Government on the basis of the law drafted in 1975 to take over the management of the Great Eastern Hotel. By citing the case of the 1975 management takeover of the Great Eastern Hotel, a landmark building in Kolkata since 1841, the Trinamool Congress Government has blithely ignored the changed status of the hotel since 2005, when lalit Suri acquired 90 per cent stake in the heritage establishment.
In doing so, the Trinamool Congress has certainly brought poriborton to the way in which Government in West Bengal is run. By citing a precedent from 1975 to justify its ad hoc decision, the Government clearly imagines itself to wield absolute authority in the style of Congress before 1977, when take-overs were the order of the day. By reducing the injunction by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India against Government ownership of media enterprises that covers even the operations of Prasar Bharati to something that the West Bengal regime and the State legislature can overrule, Ms Banerjee is making it evident that she is determined to re-invent the rules of governance because she has the power, albeit for the duration of her term.