Didi plays Lady Bountiful in Jungle Mahal, but will it work?

Didi has turned into Jungle Mahal’s Annapurna — a Lady Bountiful in a white sari. Mamata Banerjee headed out into the Maoist stronghold of West Bengal’s Midnapore district with a simple message — development for all. You want a bridge? We’ll get you one. You would like a girls’ hostel?  Don’t worry. Hoye jabe. (It will be done.) In fact, how about a dozen girl hostels? And while we’re at it let’s throw in a polytechnic school, an industrial training institute, an employment bank, vocational training centres, 2 kilos of rice a week at Rs2 a kg, an agricultural university, bicycles for all girls of classes IX to XII, 30-bed hospitals in every sub-division, even an archery academy. Mamata managed to promise all this without ever mentioning the M-word. She never referred to the Maoists by name. It’s as if she was in the Sundarbans where people don’t say “tiger” aloud, just in case the big cat materialises out of the mangroves. But perhaps the real reason is that Didi is actually taking on the Maoists in their own backyard. The Telegraph writes:

Mamata Banerjee today launched in Jungle Mahal what looked like a “bread-bombing” policy of aggressive pursuit of development programmes and peace with an appeal to people not to be afraid of Maoists, though she did not explicitly mention them.

Substitute Americans for Mamata, Afghanistan for Jungle Mahal and Taliban for Maoists in that sentence and you’ll have some sense of the challenges ahead for West Bengal’s chief minister. [caption id=“attachment_40830” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“TMC supremo and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee consoles an elderly woman during her administrative mass rally at Jhargram in West Midnapore district on Tuesday. PTI”]  [/caption] But can development be the panacea for all the ills that afflict this dirt-poor part of the state? “Of course development is the basic problem here. That’s a no-brainer," says Sudeep Chakravarti, author of Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country. “What she announced is clearly a palliative. This is just an opening gambit for Mamata Banerjee to signal her good intentions.” He describes her laundry list of sops as both “very very minor and yet significant.” Everyone knows that lack of development and poor governance is what allowed the Maoists to get a toehold in here in the first place. The question is are the Maoists really interested in development or in their own Mao-istan? “Maoists can be seen as anti-corruption. They can be seen as anti-police but they cannot be seen as anti-development,” says Chakravarti. “You cannot say don’t build schools or hospitals. Even something as minor as cycles for girls can be enormously empowering.” The Maoists obviously realise that the Chief Minister is wooing their own constituency with her “bread-bombing.”  They asked villagers to stay away from her rallies this time around. Last year some 10,000 people made it to her rally in Lalgarh. Her party won seven seats in Junglemahal. The rush was so great another 40,000 were stuck in clogged roads heading there. This time around only 5,000 showed up. Maoist leaders toured the area claiming that Mamata had been “unmasked”, that she had “betrayed” the people by leaving the central forces in place. Chakravarti says he is not surprised. “If you want to set up negotiations, you can’t just capitulate to a single gesture. I see both groups positioning themselves here.” And the Maoists know that this political game of  throw-down-your-guns-today and let-me-give-you-development-tomorrow strategy is always a dicey one. In his book Hello Bastar: The Untold Story of India’s Maoist Movement, Rahul Pandita describes what has happened in Andhra Pradesh over and over again.

In the ‘90s, the relationship between the Maoists and the Andhra Pradesh government followed more or less the same pattern: just before the elections, a particular political party would warm up to the Maoists and then, after coming to power, lift the ban on the People’s War Group.

Chenna Reddy, N Janardhana Reddy, NTR, and Chandrababu Naidu all did some variant of that. NTR  called Maoists  Desh Bhaktalu (patriots) in 1982 before he routed the Congress and then went  full bore after the Maoists once he was chief minister. The basic problem, whether in Chhattisgarh or Junglemahal or Bastar, is that the government is missing in action. And has been for a long time. The Maoists have become the face of some kind of government. Didi is trying to change that by spreading open the pallu of her sari and showering goodies like a guilty parent who has been away too long. But she’ll also have to remember she heads a state that’s broke. “There are 4,000 babies born every day in West Bengal,” her party’s vice-president Derek O’Brien said before the elections. “Each baby born today is born with a debt burden of  $10,000.” That still holds true. It is easy to promise to build bridges, it’s much tougher to cut costs. The big challenge for Mamata is not about raising the hope of hospitals and schools. The government can lay the foundation stones for those any time. But it will have to address the bigger, thornier, more systemic and far less showy issues — livelihood, misappropriation of funds meant for the region, the fear factor. “The lack of development is at the root of the troubles,” says Chakravarti. “But it’s also the lack of delivery of justice and the lack of administration.  Unless all three are addressed this won’t go anywhere.”