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Just before Durga puja, Mamata turns into a living goddess
She invited even the vanquished Tatas to build an auto factory on 1,000 acre elsewhere in Bengal.
As she stood on the giant stage in Singur and started handing out compensation cheques to the farmers, Mamata Banerjee surpassed her 5-feet-1-inch frail frame by a long shot, realising a goal that seemed more like a hallucinatory construct than a reality.
Set aside the political humdrum, the moments of magic realism were difficult to miss.
On Wednesday just about three weeks to the puja with the kaash flowers in full bloom, the woman from the humble family of Kalighat strode the stage like a Durga lording over her exploits that lay in the 997-acre backdrop nearby. The white fragmented clouds in the sky washed blue by the monsoons completed the picture.
Men danced to the beat of drums and women blew conches as their goddess vowed to breathe fertility back to the soil.
Read: Nano trouble over, Durga rides back to Singur
As if to complete the picture, some villagers played Birendra Krishna Bhadra’s signature Mahisashurmardini at their homes in the morning. On the stage Mamata stood like a magnanimous victor as it were, inviting even the Tatas to build an auto unit on an equal amount of land elsewhere.
There are indeed a few connections between the vanishing Nano plant and Durga puja.
In 2008, on the eve of the puja -- sasthi to be precise -- Ratan Tata announced that he was withdrawing from the Nano project. In the years to follow, as fertile Singur lay like a wasteland, the farmers who lent muscle to Mamata’s struggle, became objects of scorn and ridicule for their shortsigthedness.
Eight years later, on Monday, again on the threshold of another Durga puja, they watched the goddess herself descend to stage the denouement.
Read: Grocers extending credit to Singur farmers once more
Forty five years ago, after she won the Bangladesh war, Atal Behari Vajpayee called Indira Gandhi the Durga and M F Hussain famously painted her on a piece of canvas.
The people of Singur were ecstatic -- they cheered lustily, danced in joy and some simply broke down in tears. Simple village folks that they were, it was difficult for them to grapple with the theory of trickle down effects of industrialisation that the Left were offering while they dispossessed them of their land.
The farmers had a simple point: fertile land was like a mother, and she had to be rescued. They wanted someone to crush the demon, and return their plots no matter how small they were, and this woman in a white saree and rubber slippers achieved it perfectly. Drunk on power, the Left failed to read the tiller’s psyche.
For the struggling farmers Wednesday was a day of deliverance; for the chief minister it went beyond mere vindication, and became a day of political deification. Her struggle was instrumental in revising the country’s land laws and obtained a complete reversal of the acquisition process, frequently described as a legal impossibility. And all this was won by a lone woman against a mighty establishment once considered invincible.
Read: Restoration of Singur land will take a long time, say experts
The Trinamool chief has always believed in black and white, leaving no shades of grey in her discourse. Down the years since the days of the anti-acquisition movement in 2006, she always painted her political opponents in dark patches. As she distributed the cheques on Wednesday, the trembling hands that accepted them had no doubt who the demon was.
Perhaps a tad ironically for the chief minister, the supreme court verdict came just four months after the people returned her in power with a landslide mandate. Otherwise, the Left who were reduced to their worst show since Independence, would have perhaps been obliterated from the assembly.
As she takes tentative steps to expand her party in the cow belt in the run-up to the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, Mamata Banerjee will certainly utilise this image of the farmer goddess to the hilt.
From the martyr’s day podium on July 21, lyricist Kabir Suman said that 300 years later Mamata Banerjee will have temples built for her. Hardly could he imagine that the moment of deification will arrive so soon.
