The Hindu Business Line : Storm in a coffee cup

For how much longer will the people of West Bengal have to suffer the presence of such people who profess to call themselves politicians but whose only vocation appears to be to upstage each other in the public eye and switch colours when an opportunity of advantage elsewhere beckons?

APART FROM the fact that the Indonesian Salim Group initiative to set up industrial and other units in West Bengal has revealed upfront the sincerity and seriousness of the West Bengal Chief Minister, Mr Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, to set his State squarely on the road to an economic resurgence, it has also revealed the utter poverty of politics of the Opposition camp in West Bengal.

To recap, the Trinamul Congress leader, Ms Mamata Banerjee, had promised to move heaven and earth to project a show of strength expressing opposition to the Salim Group's proposed investment in the State.

In fact, having grown up in Kolkata and having learnt her ropes in politics from Congress stalwarts in the 1980s — when that party was more interested in breaking itself up rather than providing a focus to citizens opposed to Left Front rule in West Bengal — she played it by the book when she appealed to the people of the city not to send children to school because they "might find it difficult to return home".

To make sure that the message was driven home, she declared: "I am against calling a bandh immediately after the Pujas, but I should not be blamed if a bandh-like situation prevails across Bengal on Thursday (October 20)".

In the event, what happened on the day was a total farce as far as the politics of opposition is concerned, with the political opposition in West Bengal (led by the Trinamul Congress) held up to ridicule in the eyes of the world.

Not only was the Left Front Government supremely successful in outwitting administratively the disruptive plans laid by the protesters, the Trinamul leader and her handful of `loyalists' did not fail to expose themselves as political greenhorns, making a fool of themselves by being seen to chase their target quite ineffectively, ending up creating local disturbances at a city hotel and offering themselves for arrest at the State secretariat (a routine followed by every Tom, Dick and Harry of a protester).

All the bluff and bluster before the visit of the Salim Group chief executive, Mr Beni Santoso, was gone.

Indeed, to Ms Banerjee, the campaign was nothing short of a second (or third) Independence movement.

At the beginning of the week she had thundered, "We cannot simply allow the CPI(M) to take away agricultural land from poor farmers to satisfy a group of businessmen from Indonesia". As she saw it, it was also a pressing security problem for West Bengal and the nation at large. What else can one conclude from her charge that the "CPI(M) is using Pakistan's ISI in its election strategy"?

It is nothing if not downright denigration of the image of the West Bengal State Assembly that the Leader of the Opposition, Trinamul's Mr Pankaj Banerjee, was held by the police for an offence as pedestrian as shouting slogans inside the premises of the hotel where Mr Santoso was put up.

The Trinamul MLA, Mr Saugata Roy, thought up the brilliant idea of flashing his credit card in an effort to enter the hotel "for a cup of coffee", which led his "grinning" leader to make the unusually savvy comment: "I don't have a credit card or an ATM card. Saugata has several. All he wanted was a cup of coffee."

Indeed, a veritable storm in a coffee cup the entire event of Mr Beni Santoso's visit to Kolkata on Thursday-Friday was.

To cap it all, when the entire security arrangement for the visiting Salim Group official was altered because of a change in his flight plan from New Delhi, Ms Banerjee is said to have lamented: "We had planned our protests from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. But they quietly brought him in." In fact, one almost feels like chastising the authorities for not playing to Ms Banerjee's tune and keeping her schedule of protest intact.

The central issue is: For how much longer will the people of West Bengal have to suffer the presence of such people who profess to call themselves politicians but whose only vocation appears to be to upstage each other in the public eye and switch colours when an opportunity of advantage elsewhere beckons?

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