FOR HER, it’s been a long, tortuous road travelled. But the path ahead seems even longer, and more testing, as Trinamul Congress leader Mamata Banerjee, Mamata Di to most, readies to take charge after virtually single-handedly demolishing the red bastion in West Bengal.
It has been an extraordinary journey in more ways than one for the 56-year-old dogged fighter, who came from a lower middle-class family with no political connections and godfather though her father had been a freedom fighter. A graduate with a law degree, she lost her father while still a teenager. She helped her mother bring up her younger siblings. Seeds of her political career were sown during her college days itself when she became a member of the West Bengal Chhatra Parishad.
Her humble beginnings possibly endowed her with street-fighter like pugnacious qualities — qualities that have earned her both admiration as well as opprobrium for not quite belonging to the “right” social strata, or the bhadraloks if you will.
But it is her very simplicity and spartan living — a narrow bordered white Dhenkanali sari, trade-mark rubber slippers, a plain blue cloth bag, a government flat in Delhi rather than a sprawling ministerial bungalow, and travel in a close aide’s Maruti Zen rather than a cavalcade of government vehicles — that has also won her appreciation over the years.
In Kolkata, she still occupies an eight-by-four-and-a-half-foot room at her Kalighat residence, which also doubles up as her studio for painting when in the mood. A frugal eater, she does the treadmill regularly. It was in 1984 that she won her first Lok Sabha election at just 29, felling none other CPI(M) heavyweight Somnath Chatterjee in his Jadavpur stronghold against all odds. She went on to win another seven terms in Parliament.
But significantly, not all her Lok Sabha stints came as a Congress candidate. Expelled from the party in 1997 for her single-minded anti-Left agenda, she decided to plough her own lonely furrow by launching the Trinamul Congress in January 1998. Foolhardy, said many, spewing adjectives such as “temperamental”, “volatile”, “emotional”, even “fickle”, at her. The adjectives continue to this day.
But Mamata Di’s decision to strike out on her own has turned into pure vindication now. Of course, for all her warmth and down-to-earth demeanour, has always run her party like an autocrat, with all key decisions resting solely with her.