Democracy is about freedom of expression: Taniya Bhardwaj on lighting the CM's fuse

A week ago few people knew who Taniya Bhardwaj was. Now the Presidency University student in Kolkata is front page news as the young woman whose question caused Mamata Banerjee to storm off the stage accusing the students of being “Maoists and CPM cadres.” She’s the young woman who lit Mamata’s fuse at a live interaction between the CM and a cross-section of Calcuttans in the run-up to her first anniversary as chief minister, organised by CNN-IBN. It was the “youth connect” moment that imploded. Now Taniya Bhardwaj, and the open letter she wrote to the CM for the Sunday edition of The Telegraph, “Sorry Ma’am, but I am not a Maoist” , is all over Facebook and Twitter. “It’s gone viral,” says Bhardwaj. “Frankly it’s a little overkill. My question was not important. She made it important.” [caption id=“attachment_315913” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Bhardwaj’s question was not even about Mamata herself. It was about her party leaders . Photo: CNN IBN”]  [/caption] Bhardwaj’s question was not even about Mamata herself. It was about her party leaders Madan Mitra and Arabul Islam, both of whom have landed in various controversies. “I was saying now they have power but what about responsibility. Most people are perturbed with people in power. They worry if it goes to their heads.” She says while Mamata would go around town without the trappings of power, her ministers “were in a mad rush to get red lights on their cars.” The irony is Bhardwaj was one of the people who was excited about the promise of change that came with Mamata. A year ago she had written about her excitement of the prospect of change. “And when I head to the polling booth, it won’t merely be a voting room, but more like a ‘changing room’.” Even now she freely admits the CM has done a lot of good things in her first year in office.  She admires the work she did in calming the situation in Darjeeling and Jangal Mahal. She likes how Mamata pro-actively tried to thwart a general strike and make sure people could get to work. She appreciates how she set up a mentor council for her university, Presidency University. She supports her decision not to allow student elections there right away. “You need space for something to grow,” she says. Should Mamata not get the same courtesy of time and space? After all she is dealing with bankrupt coffers, a 34-year backlog and a CPM that  would be delighted to see her fail. Are her critics just expecting too much of her? This is a woman who has never had anything handed to her on a silver platter. She rose to power all on her own, battling forces within and outside her party, every inch of the way. “We expect so much of her for those very reasons,” says Bhardwaj. “If she could rise on her own, she can do so much.  Why shouldn’t we expect it? Anyway we didn’t want much. We just wanted some answers.” When Mamata ripped off her microphone and marched off  the stage, she says, the audience was stunned. “Most people believed she would come back. We were all there for her. Anyway she was not forced to answer my question. She could have just said the matter was sub judice and gone on to the next question.” While Mamata railed that the audience was stacked with SFI cadres and Maoists, as opposed to “common people”, Bhardwaj calls herself an ordinary student. She’s the vice president of her debating society. She studies political science and wants to pursue development and administration. Though the family is from Bihar, she has been born and brought up in Kolkata. “No other city makes you feel as comfortable,” she says. She remembers Mamata talking about the need to reverse the brain drain of the young from Kolkata. It resonated with her, she says, because “I am extremely loyal to my place of birth.” She even had great hopes for the chief minister. While the media now portrays her head butting with the CM as a sort of David vs Goliath encounter, Bhardwaj says she asked the question not to embarrass the CM but because she cares about the city. In fact, looking back at the evening, she says it started off really well. “When she walked in she was a charmer. She didn’t want to sit on stage. She wanted to sit with us.  But at that time the cameras were not rolling. Now all people will remember is that moment.” That has been the great dilemna for West Bengal’s hot-tempered CM. She complains incessantly about how her government’s good  work is not covered enough by the media. Yet she is the one who often gets in the way of her own achievements. By her own intemperate responses to very minor issues she makes people like Ambikesh Mahapatra, the university professor who forwarded the infamous cartoon, or a student like Taniya Bhardwaj into household names. “She needs to calm down. Her chair was being questioned,” says Bhardwaj. “She took it personally.” Though she is sorry about the way the evening turned out, she has no regrets about speaking up that evening. “I got a chance to ask her something. Most people don’t,” she says. “To be able to ask a question to the CM – who would give that opportunity away? (Mamata) kept talking about democracy. But democracy is not just about voting. It’s about freedom of expression.”