Dearest Didi,
This letter is long over due, let me admit right away.
I always thought of writing to you after your spectacular victory last year, not only to congratulate you but also to express the exhilaration I felt to see the Communists at last being thrown out of Bengal. When most of us resigned to the fate of an indefinite thuggish cadre-raj of the all pervasive party, to the indefinite subservience to the arrogance of the self-righteous dhuti-clad Marx-Lenin-Mao quoting bhodrolok netas, to the indefinite stifling of all creativity leading to the flight of the most talented and the brightest of Bengal’s boys and girls away from the shores of Bengal, to the indefinite irritation of a political culture of bandhs and empty slogans, and most of all, to the toxic intrusion of party politics in all spheres of life, you carried on your improbable and almost impossible struggle against the most entrenched of powers, at times alone, sometimes battered, often ridiculed, but yet unfazed . In spite of facing mightiest of odds your spirit remained untrammeled. Your resolve and determination remained unshaken. And then at the end of a long and lonely battle of over three decades, when Bengal unabashedly rewarded and blessed you and your incredible doggedness, I was not only beside myself in joy, but also awed by your stupendous life-force. Didi, you veritably appeared to have personified the power of Shakti to many of us!
Didi, I was born in the early years of the CPI(M)-regime. Many of us forget that it was in those years that contained the seed of your most humble political beginning. I heard that in those initial days of your political life, you went around pasting Congress party posters on the walls of Kolkata. Is it true indeed? Coming as you did from lower-middle class strata of our society, with no convent education, or with little middle-class sophistication, perhaps the only way you could move ahead in the treacherous world of politics is by honing your raw street-fighting instincts in your uncompromising and often visceral opposition to the ruling establishment. You were a woman in the world dominated by men. Even today after all these years, I find it difficult to name one other woman politician of our country (or for that matter in all of south Asia) of any consequence, who did not come from the higher echelons of our society, or more importantly did not have a powerful male figure propping them up. How could you achieve this inconceivable feat Didi?
Of course we know how you were physically assaulted by the CPI(M) goons, and at least on one of those occasions you were inches away from a fatal consequence. We also know how you had to walk out of the Congress party, even as their wily leaders tried to contain you from your uncompromising crusade against the Communists. We remember how you caused wrinkles to form on the otherwise unfazed foreheads of the Left leadership in those first elections that you faced with your newly formed Trinamool Congress party. In those years, I remember, and I’ll be honest with you, though many of us eagerly wanted the Left to go, somewhere deep within we were wary of your impulsive emotional style of politics. Used to as we were to the façade of civility of the politicians of the day, your brand of deeply personal and earthy politics made us unsure of your viability as the administrative head of our state. The question was, would you be able to translate the fury on the street to the much needed functioning of the State? And it took almost ten years for us to cross over that hesitation and bless you with an overwhelming mandate. Surely Didi, you earned it and to an extent, we were convinced that you were squarely on the road to transformation from an unrelenting rebel to a responsible guardian of the state.
But we forgot Didi, that like much of the pitiable state of affairs of Bengal, you too have been a product of the pernicious three decades of the CPI(M) regime. Your entire political life was shaped in the lurking shadow of the Communist rule, and your almost improbable political ascent has been defined by the magnitude of the shrillness of your reactions to the machinations of that regime. Perhaps in your incessant struggle against the Communists, in a cruel irony, unwittingly you internalized some of their perfidious ways. In your austere life style, in your rallying behind the poor and the oppressed, in your courting the intellectuals and the civil society, in your obdurate street-fighting instincts, in your fasts and in your bouts of fury, you actually succeeded in out-smarting the Communists in their own political idiom. Borrowing their rhetoric, you actually made it more shrill and subverted them in their own home-turf. In some ways Didi, you embody the legacy of the three decades of a retrograde communist regime, may be much to your own chagrin.
In our excitement and jubilation in the initial months after your glorious victory, we perhaps overlooked this reality. So happy we were to see the Marxists gone, we indulged ourselves in thinking that at last we have cast off any lingering shadow of Marxist influence for good! But Didi, with the news of the recent events that are coming out of our state, and more disturbingly your reactions, perhaps inadvertently, to some of them, we have been almost violently shaken up from a state of blissful stupor. For us, who welcomed your meteoric rise and your eventual installation as the CM of our state, it is somewhat embarrassing and disturbing, but to be honest, not entirely surprising. Our disappointment is mainly because we see in your recent actions a dark shadow of the vanquished Stalinist regime.
Didi, what you have achieved so far is nothing short of impossible. The biggest strength you possess is you grit and tenacity. You have your share of weaknesses too, which I am sure you very much aware of. But in spite of them, your strengths outdid your weaknesses and you succeeded in ejecting the malevolent Communist regime from our State of West Bengal. That was nothing short of a political miracle. Now Didi we are desperately hoping to see you perform even a greater miracle- that of cleansing your psyche of any remaining malicious Communist influence that you loathed and fought against for much of your life.
The tendency to see an insidious conspiracy lurking behind every mishap, the temptation to divide society based on political loyalty, the urge to indulge in foolhardy populism, the unfortunate compulsion of shielding thuggish political workers, the tendency to stifle any expression of dissent and disenchantment with the ruling establishment, the diffidence associated with transferring officials and restructuring the administration to serve one’s political purpose, Didi we have seen this is what characterized the Communist regime in Bengal for over three decades. When we elected you, Didi, with that overwhelming majority, we thought that we have brought an end to this baneful political culture that plagued our state for so long. But now we see some of these very qualities peeping out through the cracks and crevices of your government and your leadership. Will it be impossible Didi to get rid of these last vestiges of the Communist regime that you inherited in some ways, which is what the people of West Bengal actually wanted to see when they blessed you raising both their arms?
You have thrown out the Marxists from the Writer's Building, now, will you not be able to throw them out of your system? Indeed this is a much more daunting task, needing much more than grit and guts. But on this will depend your true success, your enduring legacy and the fulfillment of hopes and aspirations of millions of hapless Bengalis, crushed under a brutal regime for far too long.
I must say, I have not lost hope on you Didi. Not yet.
Best regards,
-Debarshi.
Hyderabad.
