West Bengal: Understanding Trinamul Congress

by Pratip Chattopadhyay

I

The politics of the Trinamul Congress has always been a continued search for alternates —be it in leadership style, be it in managing the sentiments of the masses or be it in creating new promises in governance. However alter-nates never arise from a scratch—alternates are some additions upon the previous experiences —and hence one can always find a resonance of the CPI-M brand in some of the slogans of the TMC [amra kara?—†Trinamul†, jachhe kara? “Trinamul†[who are we?—Trinamul, who are marching?—Trinamul] may remind many old guards of the communist movement of their yesteryear slogans of amra kara?—CPI/CPM,
jachhe kara?—CPI/CPM or in some mistakes of
the Trinamul Government (the alleged growing negligence in law and order maintenance in the State or some rigid attitude against some formal governance institution like the State Election Commission). Keeping aside such wayward similarities, the following are some features that one can identify in the TMC politics over the years:

(a) Multi-issue-based movement targeted against a specific offender culminating into a single-point agendum and continuing jihad against the ‘other’ to keep up the party appeal: For the Trinamul Congress, since its inception in 1998, the ills across the governance spectrum were due to the mismanagement or ‘politicised management’ of the Left Front Government and thus it was the declared offender against which the TMC had to fight with a single-point mission of ‘change’. Such an aim of the TMC never materialised in the 2001 and 2006 Assembly elections but it continued its jihad against the Left Front relentlessly and that paid dividend in the verdicts of the 2009 Lok Sabha polls and the historic 2011 Assembly elections. However after overpowering the offender, the TMC, now in power, still creates a suspicious maze over the CPI-M activities to make its task topsy-turvy as it has nothing but this anti-Left image to offer to its supporters. Some Cabinet Ministers of the TMC Government go to the extent of calling for ostracisation/outcasting of the CPI-M supporters in the localities.

(b) Rallying of Emotion: Topping the reasons behind the success of the TMC, one has to admit, was an attempt to create an emotional bond of ‘dharma’ or righteousness with the citizens as against the prevalent misrule. This emotional maze replaces the ideological attachment of the CPI-M-led Left Front. Emotions are clearly important in the growth and unfolding of social movements and political protest. “Moral shocks†, often the first step toward recruitment into social movements, occur when an unex-pected event or a piece of information (the Nandigram incident of 2007) raises such a sense of outrage in a person that she/he becomes inclined toward political action, whether or not the person has acquaintance with the movement. The prospect of unexpected and sudden changes in one’s surroundings can arouse feelings of dread and anger. The former can paralyse, but the latter can become the basis for mobilisation. Activists must weave together a moral, cognitive and emotional package and attitudes (the Ma-Mati-Manush slogan of the TMC). The proper emotion shifts from dread to outrage. There is someone to blame. Protests change form—from reactive to proactive protests (protests of peasants led by the TMC soon struck chord with the intelligentsia and a broadbased civil society movement took shape), movements get trans-ferred into parties (the TMC slowly found a new bunch of supporters making it a party in the true sense of having support from the societal cross-section) and emotions get transferred into verdicts—for the TMC its electoral verdict.

(c) Populism: Populism is seen as a style of politics and rhetoric that seeks to arouse a majority, or at least what their leaders passio-nately believe is a majority (like the ‘moral majority’ today, who are plainly a minority), who are, have been or think themselves to be outside the polity, scorned and despised by an educated establishment. Partha Chatterjee, in his book Lineages of Political Society (2011), observes that “populism is the effective form of democratic politics in the contemporary world†. Chatterjee notes that Ernst Lacalau, in his Populist Reason, refuses to dismiss populism merely on the ground that it is vague and empty, or that it tries to mean everything to everybody. The key move that Lacalau makes is to acknowledge the sheer heterogeneity of demands in a modern democratic polity and then distinguish between differential and equivalent demands. In the former case each demand is considered in isolation from the others and is either pressed or satisfied in a differential way. In the latter case, equivalences are sought to be established between several demands, but it is only in the latter forms that we get popular demands (as in the case of the TMC the popular demand was change or poriborton in the political milieu of West Bengal). Chatterjee notes in the essay “Swadesi Samaj†Rabindranath gave this alternative to the nation the name samaj-rajtantra, literally “sociocracy†or the rule of society. (The TMC mentioned that there must be the rule of society or of Ma-Mati-Manush as against that of the Left Front party leaders and party cadres.) Reading Chatterjee, one becomes aware of the distinction Anandachandra Mitra made between the twin ideas of rajasakti (the power of the ruler) and prajasakti (the power of the subjects). The power of the subjects emerges from their sense of claims or rights on government, and it is made effective by the desire of the rulers to promote the security and well-being of their subjects (with dissatisfaction with the Left Front reigning high, a majority of the electorate in Bengal tried to find solace in their ‘own’ government of their ‘didi’/‘elder sister’, as Mamata Banerjee is known, who will secure a dignified life, a vibrant economy and peace for them).

(d) Politics of Low-brows: With the pristine bhadrolokean (highly intellectual background of political and cultural style) Left politics on the wane in West Bengal, the TMC has introduced changes in the political vocabulary with emphasis on everyday as against the general. If one remembers the ‘subjugated knowledge’ of Foucault: “Knowledge from below… knowledge that has been disqualified as non-conceptual knowledge, as insufficiently elaborated knowledge, naïve knowledge, hierarchically inferior know-ledge, knowledge that are below the required level of erudition on scientificity†, one under-stands why the TMC is becoming popular—solely from the fact that it is different from all the knowledge that surrounds it. This knowledge has encountered hierarchical power relations in education, health and humanisation, has taken the locality into a higher scale of resistance—from the locality to the universal. This resistance pathology does not end with becoming a Chief Minister, as seen in the style of Mamata Banerjee. Notice the behavioural pattern, cultural ethos, grammar of language or emotion has not been altered here. That she has not altered her style is becoming incongruous to be accepted by the people at large (Professor Ranabir Samaddar has succinctly highlighted this aspect of ‘low-brow’ politics in some of his articles). The TMC represents the politics of low-brows and uses simple languages devoid of ideological jargons and hence strikes chord with the masses.

(e) Flexible in forging alliances for its interest which is the ‘collective interest’: The experience of the TMC suggests that they are ready to forge alliances with likeminded groups having a common set of demands and goals. The TMC did so with the Congress and Gorkha Jana Mukti Morcha prior to the Assembly polls in West Bengal, only to sever the alliance sometime after the polls. It carries forward the current trend of non-ideological alliances of Indian politics (to the extent that some months back TMC leader Mamata Banerjee asked her arch rival the
CPI-M party to move a no-confidence motion against the UPA II at the Centre which she will support!). Political parties in a sense also align with the citizens and try to find some support base in them. The TMC’s activities, it is said, are not like the general political parties that engage directly with citizens only during elections but its very existence rests on everyday contacts with citizens at large.

(f) At ease both in the streets and in the power corridor and Leaders and Issues more important than the party itself: The TMC, when in the seat of power, creates its own style and is at ease like it was when it was opposing in the streets. As the styles are innovative TMC activists are not following any set pattern of governance but try to highlight the “self-work†they had indulged in during their days in the Opposition. The way in which TMC supremo Mamata Banerjee walks around in the simplest outfits, takes to fasting or gets drenched in rain addressing rallies create ready attachment with the commoners and by offering new ways of appreciating the techni-cians and staffs of various government and cultural departments generates organisational support for her. It’s all about a leader like Mamata Banerjee who can make people rally behind her political formation but its existence depends on certain pressing issues at hand like the misrule or corruption or development agenda.

(f) ‘Clarion call’ over organisation and membership and ‘Leg-work’ coupled with ‘web-work’: Pierre Rosanvallon’s Counter-democracy: Politics in an Age of Distrust points to the emergence of new democratic practices such as the public overseeing of government performance, the prevention of controversial government projects through public resistance, and subjecting govern-ment functionaries to non-judicial trial by the public; but it has nonetheless condemned populism as the absolute counter-democracy. Populism, he says, takes the democratic function of public vigilance to the extreme and “becomes a compulsive and permanent stigmatisation of the ruling authorities, to the point where these authorities are seen as radically alien enemy powers†. (Cited in Lineages of Political Society by Partha Chatterjee) Seen in this perspective, it can be argued that the TMC begins not with an organisation and membership drive unlike political parties in general but with a ‘clarion call’ of jihad against the government of the day with a promise of a new beginning. Moreover the TMC keeps in touch with the masses not only through the classic ‘leg-work’ (the Communist Parties spearheaded this strategy) but also through intensive use of the web world like facebook and twitter to be on the right side of technological developments and ‘in’ the public space.

Thus if one tries to understand the TMC in the light of these experiences, one notes two patterns: (a) that the TMC is flexible, spurious and autonomous in its presentation. Its abnormality, its whimsicality, its so-called ‘immaturity’ become its attraction. (b) The TMC has tried to follow the method of mass engage-ment of the Leftists to an extent. The critical question therefore becomes: but for how long would the ‘immaturity’ and ‘imitation’ continue to spell magic? This leads to the second section of this paper that highlights mainstream criticisms against the TMC and also shows the ways in which the TMC has been entrapped in the maze of its own innovations.

II

West Bengal has been in the whirlwind of changes for the last couple of years and as such attracted a wide scholarly attention particularly in understanding the end of an entrenched Left regime and the pain amongst the Bengali society’s cross-section to eschew the very flexible and at times whimsical alternate regime building by the Trinamul Congress. Unlike the ideologically bound homogeneous multiparty Left Front of 1977, the Trinamul is a party based solely on the charisma of a single personality who has usurped some of the Leftist slogans, and drawn a heterogeneous medley of supporters ranging from ex-Congressmen, disgruntled Left intellectuals and opportunist Maoist cadres to retired senior police officials and Right-wing representatives of big industrial interests. In fact, her election campaign represented an interesting unique selling proposition (USP) in the West Bengal electoral scene, marked by a deft mix of a populist image of a pro-poor leader (dressed in a crumpled sari and living in a humble house in a crowded middle-class locality) and simultaneously of a media-savvy politician adept in the modern technological gimmicks of press-button solutions and instant recipes—like her slogans assuring ten lakh jobs (aimed at the skilled unemployed), and the reported promise to change Kolkata into London (to meet the tastes of the upwardly mobile upper middle class youth). [Banerjee, Sumanta (2012): ‘Post-Election Blues in West Bengal’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. XLVII, No 9]

Witnessing the early tendencies, a commentator on West Bengal politics noted in 2004 that the Trinamul Congress is a party that is focused on elections, more specifically, on unseating the Left Front in West Bengal for which it is not chary of using its varied alliances even at the cost of its long-term credibility. Mamata, how-ever, could not capitalise on them, she could not give her party a durable and depersonalised set-up to enable it to play a critical role in connecting the state and the civil societal institutions with the everyday aspirations of the economically, socially and culturally marginalised population. Whenever she stood by the urban toilers, the illegal slum dwellers, the displaced population or even the rural poor, her voice—in the absence of a systematic attempt to build up such linkages—appeared as sporadic, unconvincing and, ultimately, driven by the urge to buy quick attention. The paradox remains: the tag of ‘trinamul’ in the party’s nomenclature continues to underscore the enduring absence of a robust grassroots politics. The TMC, therefore, failed to translate its electoral promises into a social presence, which could have been its only guarantee against a premature demise. (Bhattacharya, Dwaipayan (2004): ‘Making and Unmaking of Trinamul Congress’, Economic and Political Weekly, April 3-10)

Moreover certain positive aspects of the new incumbent, like providing the Wipro group of companies a lucrative package which is no less than creating an SEZ, the installation of the Police Commisionarate, the settlement of the Gorkhaland issue through the Gorkhaland Terri-torial Administration apparatus, the positive steps in panchayat administration and the decision not to withdraw joint forces from the Maoist-hit areas but convincing some of the Maoists through words to surrender, the reforms in the proposed Land Reform Bill are illustrations of ‘adaptive governance’, that is, some of this may not reflect the same positions of the TMC when it opposed the Left Front policies but the logic of being in and operating within the framework of power has certainly influenced the TMC’s policies to adapt to the party’s changing political status. Moreover the way more and more powers are given to the bureaucrats like the Block Development Officers (BDOs) for ensuring rural local good governance runs counter to the good governance agenda of ‘de-bureaucrati-sation’ and ‘downsizing’ of government to establish a ‘post-bureaucratic’ society. It can be said that the TMC, even after coming to power, has been in a fix to understand its political position as a party or as a movement against the Left Front.

Through its sustained campaign as an Opposition party, the TMC has created among its ‘large support base’ (the party claims to possess) the spirit of identifying and slandering a ‘specific offender’ and equating every untoward incident with the failure of the government. Now with the chit-fund scam, with the student vandalism reflected in Presidency University, with the indifferent attitude of the Chief Minister on the death of a student in police custody—everyone is trying to find the ‘specific offender’ in the government administration itself (now the TMC Government). The TMC has flared up emotions in the political space of Bengal. With an unexpected event or a piece of information (the chit-fund scam of Saradha group), social movements and political protest against the TMC erupt with moral, psychological and emotional detachment from the government itself. In the post-chit-fund scam episode, there has been no assurance from the leaders of the TMC to get back the money and hence many are committing suicides.

As was mentioned in the earlier section, the TMC has created the power of subjects by introducing their sense of claims or rights on the government through the slogan of ‘Ma, Maati, Manush’ for everyone, and it has shown its desire to promote the security and well-being of their subjects through steps like bringing the entire State administration to the districts (several rounds of district visit of the Chief Minister accompanied by the top administrative bureaucrats has taken place) and thereby the sense of losing ‘a friend’ in the government is growing. As the TMC’s existence rests on everyday contacts with citizens at large on certain pressing issues at hand like the misrule or corruption or development agenda, people are at ease to transfer their anxiety and desperation on the easily accessible party of their very own ‘didi’ who is expected to make comments filled with emotional solidarity with the public or the affected families in question in the wake of any incident. Whenever she fails to do so, she is accused of betrayal. Notice, the very trends that differentiated the TMC politics are now becoming its liability.

The main criticism is that of political gimmick that the TMC has introduced to come to power in West Bengal through its various unfounded and far-too-stretched promises that now seem to be beyond fulfilment. However, the majority of the electorate in the 2011 elections ‘voted out’ the Left Front rather than ‘voting in’ the TMC. As the TMC was the viable Opposition force in coalesce with the Congress and even SUCI at that point, it filled in the void left for the political alternative. Thus the TMC, in a deeper analysis, is beyond any criticism simply because it did the best what it could have done best—to present before the electorate, suffocated under Left Front rule, a political alternative. The TMC’s criticism must start on its activities after coming to power, not based on the promises it offered before coming to power because competing promises from the TMC and Left Front did not become an electoral issue. And in such critical scrutiny of governance the TMC, in its very short tenure, has created several fault-lines that are difficult to remove in the coming days.

III

The Trinamul Congress can be seen as an ‘energy source’ in the politics of West Bengal and also in the context of the coalition politics of India. The rise of the TMC after its demise—from one MP in 2006 to 19 MPs in 2009—is like the rise of a phoenix from the ashes. The TMC is, to its credit, not only getting established as a potential force in the State politics of India but is also emerging as a master in the art of coalition politics as it has recorded alliances and break-ups with the two most powerful coalition groups in the country at present—the UPA and NDA—thus establishing itself as practical political party that can cash in whenever the situation is ripe. The TMC has based its strategy on the maxim—there is no permanence in friendship and enmity in the age of coalition politics. So the TMC is going to be the most sought-after party by the two contending coalition groups after the nation goes to polls in 2014. The TMC has also started to lead the third force in Indian politics—the so-called group of the regional parties—as seen in the Chief Minister’s meets or during the anti-NCTC (National Counter Terrorism Centre) Bill opinion-building. Thus the milieu that TMC creates in Indian politics and in West Bengal politics is the milieu of decentralised and democratic politics.

However, the recent experience of the TMC in government in West Bengal forces one to pause a bit, given the centralisation of wisdom in the Chief Minister. Is it an escapist tactics by the other leaders of the TMC by giving more and more responsibilities to their supremo? Is it the desire of the supremo herself (which is quite unlikely compared to her public image)? Is it to create a sense of satisfaction that the citizens can get if they realise that all policies are emanating from their own ‘didi’ who can do no wrong to them? These are some serious questions that need to be analysed in future to understand better the coming electoral performances of the TMC in West Bengal and the national polls. The central question remains on the base of the TMC support—is it the continuing charisma of Mamata Banerjee or the growing mass base of the TMC as a party through its various leaders at different levels? Given the rigid attitude taken by the TMC Government over the State Election Commission on a trivial issue of the number of Central security personnel deployment deferring the panchayat polls, the lack of able and efficient leadership in its various public fronts like student, youth, cultural and women wings of the party, the failure to keep the anti-Left forces in the State united, it is unfortunate for West Bengal that the ‘energy’ generated by the TMC is gradually becoming a negative energy of frustration and desperation. The sense slowly growing in West Bengal is that of a ‘nei-rajjya’ (a State where nothing fruitful happens) with a high potential to get converted into a ‘noi-rajjya’ (an anarchical situation).

While talking about populist politics a word of caution must be borne in mind as mentioned by Bernard Crick in his pamphlet, Democracy: A Very Short Introduction (2002), where he argues: The populist mode of democracy is a politics of arousal more than of reason, but also a politics of diversion from serious concerns that need settling in either a liberal democratic or a civil republican manner.†(p. 90). The TMC in its early days in government has started to become the victim of popular politics—the major concerns of development, industrialisation, employment generation, administrative reform measures and importantly establishment of peace and tranquillity in West Bengal are being diverted to trivial issues of the local councillor getting involved in vandalism, closure of the media houses, chit-fund scam to the extent that unfolding of such events one after the other in the media is becoming like the running episodes of action-packed tele-serials! In the Indian party system the days of popular politics and rhetoric are being hijacked by what is called ‘passionate politics’ of formations like the TMC.

Jeff Goodwin, James Jasper, and Francesca Polletta, in their edited volume Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements (University of Chicago Press, 2001), opine that “Once the range and significance of political passions are fully recognised, the study of politics and social movements will never be the same. The challenge is to demonstrate, rather than just state, that the new concept matters and to show when and where it matters.†The principle anxiety of the West Bengal public lies there— the hopes and aspirations of a new beginning are seen to be halted and then floundered without any direction. When the TMC faces more pressure of mass expectations in the days to come, the value of the TMC in West Bengal and Indian politics as a ‘different’ political model—as a good manager of ‘political society’ of post-colonial democracies like ours—will be tested severely. Those who oppose the TMC tooth and nail must be prepared to throw up a better alter-native and proceed accordingly to defeat the TMC by sharpening their own political positions making those more contemporary and appealing to the masses with discipline, decency and decorum.

As of now that is a far cry. For, neither has the CPI-M or the Left as a whole undergone any qualitative change for the better nor is the Congress showing any signs of capability to become the alternative. And there is no other effective and viable non-TMC formation in sight to fill the void.

The author is an Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Kalyani (West Bengal) and can be reached at chatterjee23pratip@yahoo.com