Mamata’s bulldozers may backfire. Poor infrastructure is Kolkata’s problem, not hawkers

28/06/2024

There is no rest for Mamata Banerjee. Three weeks after the Lok Sabha elections results, she has begun prepping for the 2026 Assembly elections. Like every house-proud woman, she has launched into frenzied spring cleaning.

Blowing hot and cold in turns, she has brutally applied the duster to cops and bureaucrats who she suspects may have gone soft on the BJP lately, in case of a change of power equations in the polls.

She has verbally vacuumed senior TMC leaders who she suspects of flirting freely with corruption on multiple fronts, especially civic services across the state’s 120-odd civic bodies, including the Kolkata Municipal Corporation, which is also due for an election in 2026.

Bulldozers on the job

Mamata isn’t satisfied with just the duster and vacuum, however. To get her party and West Bengal ready for elections that are two years away, she has even put bulldozers on the job. Yes, the much-reviled bulldozer of Yogi Adityanath’s infamy and that one unforgettable episode of bulldozer justice in Delhi post-Shaheen Bagh.

Yes, bulldozers were out on the streets in urban and suburban spaces in West Bengal, including Kolkata’s peripheries; demolishing shacks, shanties and roadside stalls—where the poorest eke out a living selling anything that has a market—which are glaringly emblematic of corruption in the police, bureaucracy and Mamata’s party colleagues.

But why is Didi suddenly so angry? After all, this kind of nasty, petty corruption has been endemic in this state’s urban spaces. It was certainly there six months ago and has even added a new word to the country’s popular political vocabulary—tolabaji—a kind of tax, almost, that you have to pay if you want to build a house, set up a shop or a small factory, or get permission for X, Y, and Z.

So, why?

All BJP’s fault, eventually. In the recently concluded Lok Sabha elections, the party that aspired to make unprecedented gains in the state lost six whole seats from its 2019 tally of 18. But analysts still hair-splitting the results noted an odd trend: The BJP had made surprising gains in Bengal’s urban spaces; in Kolkata, positively startling.

TMC’s urban problem

Apologies for the minutiae, but the city’s municipal corporation has 144 wards. In the last election to this civic body in 2021, the BJP had won in only three. This time, it has led in as many as 47 wards, leaving the TMC gasping.

TMC MP Saugata Roy, re-elected from the mostly urban Dum Dum constituency adjoining Kolkata, had his finger on the pulse. He won by over 70,000 votes, more than his 2019 margin of 53,000. But his vote percentage has slipped by 0.56 per cent, from 42.51 in 2019 to 41.95 in 2024. One of the many things he said after his win: People living in high-rises did not vote for us.

But Mamata knows that TMC’s base is not really middle-class urban Bengal. She has ensured her party’s spectacular electoral recovery from the 2019 hiccup by her single-minded focus on the rural voter—almost 75 per cent of total voters in the state. Lakshmir Bhandar and other welfare measures she has launched over the years have reached only a small percentage of the urban voters.

So why should she be surprised into Yogi-like action by a blip in urban voting trends?

Mamata has not forgotten her own party’s history. One of the earliest signs of serious disaffection with the Left Front government in West Bengal came in the year 2000. That year, the TMC, born in 1998, was not even two years old but went on to win one of the most significant electoral victories in its career: the election to the prestigious Kolkata Municipal Corporation. It lost the next time but won it back in 2010, after which there was no stopping the TMC’s meteoric rise.

Remembering history selectively

The last thing she must want is this history repeating itself, the BJP making capital out of urban disaffection as she was able to.

However, history’s lessons are complex things. When it lost elections to the Kolkata Municipal Corporation in 2000, the Left Front was paying the price for Operation Sunshine, launched in the dead of a nippy November night in 1996. Top CPI(M) leaders hit the streets with police and civic workers to tear down illegal encroachments on 21 of the city’s streets and pavements.

The day after, as the urban legend goes, the bustling Gariahat More in south Kolkata saw a scene never seen before or since: Mamata sitting on the pavement selling some sundry wares.

Just like a hawker.

To have the same Mamata now repeating the Left’s big blunder is astonishing. Could such a metamorphosis be triggered merely by the BJP? Surely, no one would know better than her that the solution to problems in West Bengal’s urban spaces is not merely hawker-free pavements. The correct answers include civic infrastructure, jobs, education, housing, and other opportunities. Some of the slimmest metropolitan streets I have seen are in London. They don’t make London what it is.

Didn’t someone promise to turn Kolkata into London one of these days?

The bottom line is, Mamata’s new focus on spring-cleaning her party, her administration, Kolkata, and other cities in the state in preparation for her fourth bid for chief minister of West Bengal is welcome. This great city deserves it and if it has sent a subtle message to her to show it some serious TLC, she should not misinterpret it.

Meanwhile, in politics, two years is a very long time and Mamata must know it is dangerous to remember history selectively.

Monideepa Banerjie is a senior journalist based in Kolkata. She tweets @Monideepa62. Views are personal.

(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)