Why the handling of Saradha scam is make or break for Mamata

Mamata Banerjee completed two years in office with a giant full page ad. From Jayalalithaa. Newspaper readers in Kolkata saw full page ads this week from Amma asserting Tamil Nadu’s rights on the Cauvery and tooting her “triumphant two years” of inexpensive eateries for the poor. Mamata opted for more restraint in a time of Saradha scams – merely a third of page of excitement about “First position in Boro Cultivation”. No warm fuzzy feelings emanate from the ads unlike Amma who is pictured ladling out the sambar surrounded by happy women in hair nets (she herself isn’t wearing one). Mamata just has her Welcome-to-Bengal smile in one photograph and a pensive looking-into-the-distance demeanour in another. That reflective look is probably appropriate since it accompanies her government’s release of a Draft Investment and Industrial Policy of West Bengal, not exactly Trinamool’s strongest point. Mamata has been playing down the two year anniversary unlike the jamboree that greeted the first one. On her Facebook page she wrote “Two years is not a big time to evaluate a new Government.” But she trotted out some achievements nonetheless:

In, NREGA (100 days work) we are No. 1 in the country in terms of expenditure(107%) vis a vis funds received in 2012-13. In GDP, agriculture and allied sectors, industry and services, the state grew faster than India as a whole. Now both Jangal Mahal and Darjeeling are smiling.

But that’s all PR fluff from the government, meant to be taken with a pinch of salt. Here is some bona fide good news for Didi on completing two years in office. An opinion poll conducted for ABP News by The Nielsen Company finds that despite all the media hoopla about her missteps, Mamata Banerjee retains her personal popularity. Her party however is not so fortunate. 21% surveyed think only two Trinamool MPs are involved in the Saradha deposit scandal. 47% think many more Trinamool leaders are involved. That means despite the party back pedaling at furious speed from Saradha, a whopping 68% of those surveyed are not buying their excuses. But voters still have a soft corner for Mamata. 34 percent do not think her as being intolerant to criticism. Though almost an equal number do think of her as being intolerant, the number of naysayers is important because that’s the charge leveled most often at her. The question is can Mamata dip into that reserve of goodwill to get something done? And not just about first position in Boro cultivation. While the poll numbers can massage her personal ego, they are not good news for the party. It means that two years in power has not allowed her second rung leaders to rise very much in public esteem. [caption id=“attachment_802643” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  While the poll numbers can massage her personal ego, they are not good news for the party. PTI[/caption] 22% of those surveyed thought TMC is responsible for the growth of illegal money markets in Bengal. 19% also blamed the Left but the CPM is taking solace in the fact that their free fall seems to have bottomed out. It’s also not clear that the Trinamool-Congress divorce means the Congress has become a political non-entity in West Bengal. The survey projects that if Lok Sabha elections were held now and TMC and Congress contested separately they would get 14 and 9 seats respectively while the Left would bag 18. If TMC and Congress were together, it would merely change the numbers slightly – 23 for the combo and 17 for the Left. So it’s unlikely any remarriage is in the offing. It also means Mamata will be desperate not to allow the Left any kind of comeback in the next elections. What Didi will be chagrined to know from the poll is that she features nowhere among national respondents asked about the best leader in the country. The front runner there is Narendra Modi. But at 17 percent he’s only one point ahead of Manmohan Singh with Rahul and Sonia Gandhi behind them. The Congress will be gleeful that it occupies 3 of the top 4 slots but that’s just scraps of cold comfort for the party. The BJP should note that none of its other leaders make it in either even as it wants to project a plethora of choices, not just a Modi. In general it’s clear, the electorate is fed up with them. The survey predicts that if Lok Sabha polls were held now the UPA would slump to 136 seats while the NDA would rise to 206. But the likes of Mamata will be looking at 167 seats projected for “Others” as being the real gainers in the fight. As the headline in The Telegraph summarizes it “Cong loss not BJP’s full gain.” Polls in the end however are terribly misleading, almost as misleading as divining the future based on the commentboards of news portals. As Mamata promises to “do our best to make Bengal the No. 1 state in the country” she would do well not to dwell too much on the projections of one survey. How she handles the implosion of Saradha and similar funds at home is going to matter much more in the long run than all the speculative arithmetic about political bedfellows at the centre. Mamata should worry about the Saradha fallout because as Devadeep Purohit reported in The Telegraph this week, even as Mamata touts her success in creating jobs in her state, companies like Saradha actually employ more people than the Bengal government. “Rice cultivation has become a loss-making proposition… There are no industries here. People in our district have joined the chit funds in hordes as agents It is the only industry that has grown,” a Congress leader told the newspaper. Even accounting for the political bias in the statement that should be food for thought for Mamata Banerjee as she embarks on her third year in office. If that becomes the great growth industry in the state, then which politician will risk killing the goose that lays the golden eggs?