Bengal comes of age: colourless sari takes over spotless dhoti

The verdict in West Bengal is clear. Majority chose to give Mamata Banerjee, whose Trinamool Congress bagged 20 seats, a chance. For decades she lived with just one fossilised tag :Love her, hate her, you cannot ignore her. Her relevance in Bengal politics was just that: you cannot ignore her but you cannot touch her either, especially if you are an ``educated`` Bengali boasting of cultural affinity.

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On Saturday as the results and trends started pouring in, it was a verdict loud and clear- it was a verdict against the sham, cultivated Bengali middle class cultural values. Values as much based on frustrations in workplace and tinder box public transports as shopping malls displaying expensive LCD TVs and bedrooms where contraceptives remain unused. Values, or the lack of it, that prevented acknowledging Mamata Banerjee as a rightful challenger of the communists.

For long a large section of people in Bengal actually were voting against the communists. But Mamata Banerjee finally translated the anger against communists into votes and votes into seats in this election. The journey was not easy. She not only fought the Congress treachery or the organised communists but the apathy and sarcasm of Bengal`s unkind and judgemental educated social class with an opinion on everyone and everything but not the honesty or power to stand up against injustice. The ``spotless``dhoti for many years was a favourite symbol of  fragile middle class dogmas.

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People chose it over uncouth ways of Mamata Banerjee and her austere, inexpensive saris. Uncharitable remarks on her lower middle class bearing always flew fast and thick. It is a herd mentality hard to be defeated. If one celebrity has expressed admiration for Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee`s silver white mane, fair complexion and white dhoti (I have no idea why we keep writing spotless dhoti, as if to expect a public figure to sport soiled garments), others just followed. ``Oh, he is so cool, so refined, so handsome!``It was much like the collective howls of jackals. One among the pack just needed to start it.

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Finally it is the turn of a colourless sari worn humbly by a lady who has only one agenda in life- to defeat the Marxists in Bengal. It is high time Bengali middle class start accepting candour and originality, or have they if this election is any indicator? After all some of their biggest style and cultural icons stooped before the Slumdog appeal of Mamata to see a change in the state.  

What I see in the victory, many had asked. It is historic in many ways and I have one incident to share to explain it for me. In the early 1990s when I was a student of Masters in Journalism in Calcutta University, one day as I was preparing to go the university, a youth living next door stood at my gate. We were living in a humble rented house in a nondescript lower to middle middle-class south Kolkata locality.

The only thing uppermost on my mind was to come out of the situation. Politics or ideologies were not much on my radar then, not even now. The young man, whom I later found out to be a member of the Student Federation of India (SFI), the student arm of CPI-M, asked me to stay back home. It was election day in the university and in the journalism department a revolution had already taken place. Four independents with an overwhelming support of the students had challenged the SFI. The SFI was furious and so their cadres were not only violent on the campus but also tracked down diplomatic fence sitters like me to their nondescript localities- to bully into staying indoor on the election day.

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I voted that day but not with confrontation. I could shrewdly convince him of my neutral role in politics which actually was a truth and my neighbour (a moderate I guess) relented. But it was an eye opener for me. I realised the network of the leftists and their surveillance camera installed across my humble dwelling. Till then I was myself a left leaning person, having grown up on the myth of a ``classless``USSR and the projections that reached us through the free Soviet publications. The fall of Berlin Wall had not sunk in actually in me when this incident happened, always a late bloomer that I am. But I was reading George Orwell then and trying to figure out the inspirations behind those writings.

Many years later, when our car was stopped by the CPI-M cadres camping at the frontier of Nandigram and we faked our allegiance to the leftists and grovelled before them for letting us in, I realised what it means to live under a regime that rules for over three decades.

Actually to be honest to live under communists was never too much of a problem for people like us, having chosen a path that do not cross theirs. I even voted for them after the university election incident and was no less appreciative of Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee`s efforts to break the stagnation in West Bengal when he took over and donned the hat of a reformist.  

Left would introspect after this debacle as they said, but I hope their introspection factors in not just the people of Nandigram or Singur but the fact that human beings are a combination of all animals. They have a dog in them that ensured loyalty for the communists for decades, and they have a bit of other less loyal animals, living untamed, fangs hidden inside like carnal desires.

On Saturday as the results were being declared and the state remained glued to TV screens, many things happened in Bengal. People through SMS, phone calls and other means of communication poured out their feelings. Sweets were distributed and it was brisk business for confectioners.

The Trinamool Congress celebrations, restrained I would say, were just expected. But people at large celebrated. Celebrations that would remain undocumented, unaccounted. Celebrations by hapless tenants or landlords who lived at the receiving of communist diktats in their localities, celebrations by people who could have held deserving positions in schools, colleges and universities had their candidatures been ratified by the judges sitting at Alimuddin Street, the CPI-M headquarters in central Kolkata. It indeed is celebration time for those who want to a see the loosening of  the communists` anaconda grip over the academic institutions.

But the victory is not of Mamata Banerjee`s alone. Banerjee`s political ambitions met a match in the selfless clamour for change by Bengal intellectuals, especially those who are not disgruntled defectors of the red camp but those who owed their success to talent and hard work and not favours distributed by the Marxists. While the bigwigs of Bengal cultural world revolted, the Marxists were left with a motley group of small time actors and intellectuals, majority of whom joined the red camp even before they carved out an identity for themselves in their individual fields. Some of these filmmakers and playwrights ended up making campaign films and plays for Marxists before their own works attained critical acclaim even nationally, or poets whose claim to fame have been through their TV attendance to hold briefs for the Marxists.

Congress or Trinamool Congress lack the organised machinery of Marxists but when it comes to browbeating common people with political power and clout, no political party would be any different having imbibed the same political culture that prevails in the Indian subcontinent. But restraint is the password for winning assembly elections in 2011 for Mamata Banerjee now, her eyes set on the Writers` Buildings, the imposing state secretariat that is the seat of power for the red for over three decades.

So for the moment, let us not take away the joy of victory from the opposition or all those who voted for them, but let us not write off the Marxists of Bengal as well. They are here to stay and they are still in power. Also they have by and large lived by secular ideals and strengthened a political culture that did not breed a Mayawati or Jayalalitha in Bengal. Let us dedicate this victory to the spur for reforms in the communist ranks in Bengal and a restrained opposition who should not let the same forces of arrogance take over. Let us give democracy, plurality and fair play a chance in Bengal politics.

(Sujoy Dhar works as the East India Correspondent of a foreign news agency)