Partha, Arpita and mountain of cash: 10 images of TMC’s Bengal that shook India

Leave aside politics, the first recall of Bengal in the public mind has always been of its unrivalled literature, art, music, Durga Puja, food, revolutionary thought; and its lush physical beauty.

But can you leave aside the politics and think of Bengal today?

No.

Because ugly political images of the last 11 years hang in front of you like a hundred carcasses hanging from hooks at the slaughterhouse.

These images tell the story of a bleeding, decaying state. They expose a psychosis that afflicts what was once the intellectual nerve centre of the nation. They make the world form a bleak impression about the state.

Images of heaps of cash at Bengal former minister Partha Chatterjee’s ‘close associate’ Arpita Mukherjee’s home after an Enforcement Directorate raid pushes that ugly Bengal a lot closer to our noses. We see the pink and green notes grotesquely piled up in a corner, as it is kitchen trash the morning after a feast. It reeks of a polity so corrupt that it does not even care what so much excess money can achieve for those who truly need it.

Along with the photos of the rotund 69-year-old and his young, pretty companion, the cold mounds of cash just completes the sleaze.

It gives us an occasion to take a quick look at the images coming out of Mamata Banerjee’s TMC-ruled Bengal and how they capture the state’s slow descent into corruption, violence, and depravity. These images are numerous and compete with one another in ugliness. It is hard to pick 10, but here is an attempt.

1. Partha’s molls and money:

Photos of the ED raids have exposed not just Partha’s alleged generosity towards Arpita. TV screen have blazed with reports of another of his liaisons with a university teacher named Monalisa Das, who apparently owns more than 10 properties in Shantiniketan alone, two farmhouses, several more in Kolkata and elsewhere. More filth is likely to spill.

2. Khela hobe with blood:

The images of post-election violence of 2021 will haunt Bengal and India for a long time. Mobs setting houses on fire, murdering and raping BJP supporters while hired DJs play TMC’s celebratory ‘Khela Hobe’ song have got stuck in public memory. It is one of the worst ongoing massacres of our times.

3. Hanging fruits of violence:

One of the early ones was 18-year-old Trilochan Mahato, a BJP worker in tribal belt of Purulia. Then others followed. Young men allegedly murdered and hung from trees to set an example and emboss a brutal image in collective memory so that none dares to challenge those in power.

4. Roddur Roy abusive videos:

This bearded, eccentric man made a name abusing the daylights off icons like Rabindranath Tagore, sprinkling their songs with the most vulgar lyrics. It could have been shrugged off as a cultural eccentricity if he was not arrested for gratuitously abusing the CM. With Roddur Roy thrown in the slammer, ugly art got uglier.

5. The Sovan-Baishakhi spectacle:

The burlesque images around the love affair between TMC politician and former Kolkata mayor Sovan Chatterjee and his girlfriend Baisakhi Banerjee simply reinforced how devoid of classiness Bengal’s entertainment had become. A senior politician willingly let his life become a cheap YouTube drama.

6. Madan Mitra, the loud jester:

Saradha scam-tainted ex-minister Madan Mitra took public discourse one notch lower by making tasteless videos with B-grade starlets. The images are a heady mix of sleaze and clownery and show how TMC brazenly uses cheapness as currency in a cultured place.

7. Broken city, fallen flyover:

The images of Kolkata’s Vivekananda flyover collapse of 2016, in which 27 people were killed and more than 50 injured, have been one of the most traumatising visual representations of Mamata Banerjee’s regime. It captured corruption and indifference of the administration in one image.

8. Narada tapes and bribery:

The Narada sting operation carried out Mathew Samuel showed high-ranking TMC officials taking bribes to extend political favours to one company. It was one of the earliest visuals of naked corruption by the party.

9. Kunal Ghosh in police cage:

A distraught Kunal Ghosh, accused in the Rs 2,500 crore Saradha scam, banging the doors of the police van and accusing Mamata of heading the corruption was one of the strongest images of the time. Since then, Kunal has been tamed and made to toe the party line as spokesperson.

10. Mamata’s ominous namaz:

From just a year before she became the chief minister, Mamata Banerjee started releasing her photo in advertisements reading namaz. After she came to power, the images became a regular affair on billboards and social, an unabashed communal call to Muslims. Along came the doles for imams, and her aide Firhad ‘Bobby’ Hakim proudly telling a reporter how he made Kolkata’s Kidderpore area a “mini-Pakistan”. Rest is a long history of appeasement.

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