Mamata Banerjee won't tolerate injustice, so why is WB crumbling under weight of corruption?

One of my neighbours, a nodding acquaintance really, is deeply troubled. Her mother went missing from their village home when she was around eight, her father never bothered to look for her mother but went and got married instead, she was packed off to an uncle who brought her up. My neighbour, now a grandmother, is suddenly determined to find her long-lost mother. She went to the police who did what they do best, turn a deaf ear. A few days ago she came to me to launch a press campaign. When I pleaded helplessness she brought out her brahmasatra: Then I will go to Didi. Mamata Banerjee will not turn me away. She could well be right. Just the other day, a young girl who was being forced into marriage by her parents somehow found her way to the chief minister’s doorstep. Her wedding plans were cancelled. Mamata Banerjee’s caring, responsive image was duly burnished and got full publicity from a now-pliant press. This is the best of times, this is the worst of times for the residents of West Bengal. Things move, problems are solved, at times the impossible is achieved, police take action, citizens get relief but only if you get the chief minister’s attention. Otherwise, your fate may well be that of Santosh Kumar Lodh, lying bedridden and almost comatose in a crumbling house. Lodh had plans to repair his Salt Lake home last winter. Salt Lake has its own municipality but is, for all practical purposes, a part of Kolkata. Work finally began in the Lodh house in March – only to be halted within days by the henchmen of local councillor Anindya Chattopadhyay. Then came the demand from the councillor himself: pay Rs 12 lakh if you want work on your house to continue which according to his daughter led to Santosh Lodh’s stroke, paralysing him and robbing him of his speech. Lodh had tried the usual course of invoking help from ‘influential’ connections including Trinamool MP Sudip Bandopadhyay, getting his powerful allies to write letters on his behalf and, of course, complaining to the police. Nothing happened. His house still awaits the necessary repairs. After all, Anindya Chattopadhyay was a councillor of the ruling Trinamool Congress. Not just any councillor too. He had earned his fifteen minutes of fame in the 2015 Salt Lake municipal elections when he beat up an elderly voter practically in front of television cameras and still went on to win the elections. Anindya Chattopadhyay’s patron saint in the party is (most likely ‘was’) Sabyasachi Datta who earned his own fifteen minutes of fame before the recent Assembly elections when a sting operation found him saying, on camera, how Calcutta’s infamous builders syndicates were his source of strength and how one risked the party’s very existence if they tried to put an end to the notorious ‘syndicate raj’. But sometimes the wheels of justice do grind. Anindya Chattopadhyay, for whom no one was too small or too big to extort, demanded Rs 15 lakh from another Salt Lake resident who also wanted to get his house repaired. Unfortunately for Chattopadhyay, the owner of this house happened to be a close friend of Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. Not that that helped, well atleast till some young men went berserk before Eid in Dhaka. [caption id=“attachment_2891346” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] A file photo of Mamata Banerjee. PTI[/caption] When West Bengal’s chief minister called up the Prime Minister of Bangladesh to express her sympathies for the tragedy at the Holey Artisan Cafe she learnt some home truths instead. Sheikh Hasina told her about the troubles her friend Arunabha Mukherjee was facing at the hands of Anindya Chattopadhyay. Mamata Banerjee swung into action only to be stymied by a legal loophole. Sheikh Hasina’s friend, who had written letters of complaint to the chief minister’s office and other such relevant places, had never lodged a formal police complaint. But if the chief minister wishes, the police can deliver. They dug up Santosh Lodh’s complaint that had been gathering dust for the last four months, marched up to Anindya Chattopadhyay’s home on Tuesday morning and promptly arrested him on at least six counts, ranging from extortion to murderous threats and conspiracy. Santosh Lodh’s daughter cannot make out if her father has been able to comprehend the turn of events. Party loyalists are on an overdrive to spread the message that this is Mamata Banerjee mark-II, a re-elected (with a thumping majority), rejuvenated, new and improved chief minister who will not let any unfairness, any injustice pass unhindered.  “I will not tolerate such things,” she has reportedly told her party. By letting a party councillor be arrested she has, conveyed to one and all that no one — however high or low— will be allowed to get away with any wrongdoing. Of course, only if she gets to hear about it in the first place. But how many of us will be able to reach her ears is the big question. There is no system to fall back upon. Other elected representatives, the administration, the police, no one, nothing moves unless she says so. Even at the panchayat level, fearing a repetition of the CPI(M)’s rule of terror and corruption, the chief minister has bypassed elected leaders, preferring to operate through appointed officers. In practical terms this means constant visits by her and her team of bureaucrats to each and every district where she listens to people’s woes and orders the administration to do what needs to be done. The result: no one, not even the block development officer, moves a finger unless ordered to do so by the chief minister herself. This is how it works all the way up to Nabanna, the state secretariat, itself. The chief minister is said to have admitted that she has to deal with several letters every day, complaining about the highhandedness and illegal activities of lower-level party functionaries, especially municipality councillors. Mamata Banerjee would like us to believe that she herself is quite unaware of the perils of the system she has put in place so assiduously and with such determination. According to a report in Bengal’s largest circulating newspaper, the Anandabazar Patrika, the chief minister has expressed perplexity at how such corrupt councillors and legislators get elected time after time (a la Anindya Chattopadhyay). Does the chief minister really have no clue that people didn’t elect Anindya Chattopadhyay, they elected Mamata Banerjee in every elected position in the state. She even asked people to vote for her in all 294 Assembly seats, irrespective of whoever was the candidate. She knows all this too well and acts accordingly – she is the state.