Did Mamata Banerjee read the civic elections all wrong? Right up to the day of results, Banerjee?s rhetoric was rather offensive, blaming all and sundry in advance if the Trinamool Congress were to falter at the semi-final stage, the finals being the assembly elections slated for next year. She went hammer and tongs at the Left Front?s alleged rigging tactics, and worse, dragged a train tragedy into the realm of politics. In the end, she needn?t have worried: her party stormed the Kolkata Corporation, bagging 95 of the 141 wards. In the 81 municipalities spread over 16 districts that went to the polls on Sunday, the Trinamool Congress bagged 36, the Left 18. Even in Salt Lake, where many intellectuals and Left ministers live, the Trinamool got 16 of 25. Not surprisingly, she called for early elections, which are due next year, saying the Left had lost the mandate to rule.

The Left, which had hold of 16 municipalities after the Lok Sabha polls, hasn?t really bettered its position. While all indications are that the Trinamool Congress is well on its way to the seat of power or Writers? Buildings, nothing is a guarantee in politics. And the Left, after a mauling in the 2009 Lok Sabha polls in May, had initiated a process of correction in the ranks. With the Congress not aligning with the Trinamool for the civic elections, the CPM had even been working overtime to drive a wedge between the two allies at the Centre. But with an emphatic Kolkata corporation win, Banerjee and her party definitely has the upper hand. It?s up to her to end the vicious blame game politics at play in the state, obstructing development and Bengal?s way forward.

If Bengal is ready for change, with the Trinamool emerging as the only alternative, can we expect a bit of grace from Banerjee? Admittedly, it?s a bit difficult for her to change her image. In her bitter fight against the Left, she has had to contend with a ruling party whose leaders refused to take her name. All that has changed as the groundswell of support for Trinamool shows, though relations with Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee aren?t civil, to say the least. Even when Jyoti Basu was on his death-bed, Banerjee wouldn?t visit the hospital if Bhattacharjee was inside; she stayed away from meeting Congress president Sonia Gandhi at Basu?s funeral too because she would have had to be in the same room as the Bengal chief minister. The reason may be apocryphal but she did stay away from the funeral, which irked even some of her party leaders. There?s too much rancour between the two key parties in Bengal, and with the classes and masses known to get hysterical over politics, there seems to a degradation in civil life like never before.

By now, Bengal is perhaps used to Banerjee being mercurial, undiplomatic and tactless, but what followed after the train tragedy last week was a new low. Even while all indications were that Maoists were involved, maybe rebel cells within the rebels, Banerjee refused to name the Maoists. She said the rail disaster, Bengal?s worst and one of the country?s too, in which over 150 lives were lost, was a ?deep-rooted political conspiracy, hatched days before the civic polls?, hinting at a CPM hand. Banerjee, who took the Maoists? help during the Nandigram and Singur agitations, didn?t mention the Maoists, neither did the Railways? FIR. The CPM blamed her for not paying attention to her ministry. Both sides, instead of demanding stern steps to stop these acts of terror, which has made travel so perilous, launched the usual blame-game cycle that follows every incident of violence or any incident for that matter. In fact, when Banerjee was asked whether she had offered to quit like her counterpart Praful Patel after the Mangalore tragedy, she got incensed: ?What did the chief minister (Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee) do after the Stephen Court fire?? The fire on a heritage building on Park Street killed 43 and Bhattacharjee hadn?t offered to resign. When Banerjee was with the NDA, she quit as railways minister in 2001 over the Tehelka expose and then seeking defence minister George Fernandes?s resignation.

If there are no guarantees on how Banerjee will react to a situation, a lot of the blame must go to the Left as well, which has been ruling Bengal for over 30 years. There? is hooliganism in the cadres, complacency has set in and in key sectors like health, education and infrastructure Bengal is a laggard. A visit to the government hospitals will depress you no end; schools are many, but the quality of education often a big question mark; when the industry began its exodus from Bengal in the 70s, the state became power-surplus and didn?t plan for the future. Now, that the industry is making a comeback, despite the Singur setback, one of the key things lacking is power?no one seems to have remembered to draw up power plans.

As Sanand opened its Nano factory gates on Wednesday, it?s ironic that Banerjee and her party drove some more nails into the Left?s coffin. As Gujarat gets job opportunities for 10,000, courtesy the Nano factory, Banerjee will have to do much more to win back the industry?and jobs?into a state, already suffering due to the Singur setback. Her task is cut out as she gets ready to rule the state, and before anything else, she will have to sort out political alignments?a strength of the Left, having ruled in a coalition for over three decades. Will we see grace, now that there?s less pressure?

Banerjee should consider emulating Mayawati?s example as she readies for government next year

Nistula Hebbar

Even the most ardent of Left baiters are a little uncomfortable at the prospect of Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee becoming the pole of anti-Left forces in West Bengal. Quite simply, she is notoriously difficult and temperamental, to an extent that she makes even the most ideologically rigid Marxist appear reasonable by comparison, as the Congress is finding out. But the results of the WB local body polls have an important lesson for the Congress, as much as it does for the Left, that it takes Mamata Banerjee in all her contrariness to provide a credible challenge to an entrenched political system.

The Left?s uninterrupted 30-year rule in WB is as much a result of popular voting as it is of the Left?s ability to undermine and cut deals with every political force that challenged it. From the Congress to the fledgeling BJP in the state, in Marxist-speak all were made ?collaborators?. Soon, Banerjee offered unstinting resistance to this, and when her time came, as it did with the Nandigram and Singur agitations, she was in perfect position to reap the political benefits of it.

In fact, rather than Marx, sociologist Max Weber appears to have a theory which can put the Mamata phenomenon in better light. Weber, who presented a dismal picture of modern societies, in their inevitable march towards rationality and increasing bureaucratisation offered only one possible ray of hope. That of a charismatic leader working outside the system, an anti-force who would overcome structures in a storming of the citadel.

In WB, for the last 30 years, the Left had provided its own style of cadre-based leadership, which disavowed personality-based politics and systematically strengthened its base and ideological dissemination in the state. From para (neighbourhood) clubs to every elected office, it appeared that the Left and its cadre were everywhere.

The Congress, consistently referred to as a party of governance, was ill suited for the ?taking no prisoners? type street agitation required to provide any challenge to the Left. When the first UPA government was formed in 2004, they went into alliance with the Left effectively surrendering whatever claim they may have had to the anti-Left force. Even as late as last week, PM Manmohan Singh displayed an unusual amount of warmth for his erstwhile allies.

In the 2004 election, Mamata Banerjee?s Trinamool Congress got only one Lok Sabha seat, Banerjee?s own. But she had an advantage over the Congress, unlike them she had no structured response to the Left, which could be negotiated. No seats which she wanted to win with Left support nor any government to form. As a lone ranger, her eccentricities like her spartan living, hawai chappals, one-room home and handloom sarees became virtues in the anti-Left campaign. The Congress, in contrast, with its imperative of maintaining a government at the Centre lost out.

When Nandigram and Singur happened, she attracted the coalition of those opposed to the Left, the peasantry in places where land was being acquired for industrial projects, the minority communities felt a stagnation in their advancement in the state, and even the intellectuals felt that after 30 years, the revolution was being betrayed.

The local body elections in WB are being referred to as the semi-final to the biggie?the assembly polls next year. Even the Left concedes that chances of it being voted out of power in those elections are strong. The Left and the Congress are consoling themselves with the fact that, while it takes a maverick rogue force to unseat an entrenched structure, it takes organisation to run a government. Comparisons to that other stormy petrel, Uma Bharti abound. She was good enough to unseat the Congress in MP but was hopeless as chief minister.

That may as well be. Weber in his characteristic pessimism also said that unless charisma is married to rationality or bureaucracy, it too would fail as a force of authority. In this scenario, Banerjee would do well to heed the lessons of yet another political history, that of UP chief minister Mayawati. She has leveraged her image, as the only one who had boundaries when it came to electoral tie ups, to win an absolute majority for herself and run the state as well. To be fair, her administration is neither better nor worse than what UP has been used to in the past.

Even for those uncomfortable with Mamata Banerjee and her mercurial nature, her ascent has the touch of the inevitable. It had to be her.