Mamata B and the Politics of Hon-Hon

There is a Bengali expression that describes the way Mamata Bannerjee, the new Chief Minister of West Bengal, India, charges down the corridors of her office building (Writer’s) and the various hospitals, information centres, cultural institutes she pays surprise visits to. It is called Hon-Hon. Bengali is a language where physical sounds made by human actions or the sounds made outside in the atmosphere turn into words. Thus Hon-Hon is the sound of air that swirls and turns around sharp corners like waves of compression and expansion, thus creating the acoustic effects of drag and swirl which even a wind tunnel experiment cannot accurately simulate. In Fluid Dynamics, the Navier-Stokes equations are hard to integrate and resolve over a difficult topography. But the impact of her Hon-Hon walk is now becoming pronounced and apparent. Her intent seems to be, to shock and awe. She charges down corridors, her hallmark rubber slippers slapping up the floors and streets of Bengal, while rotund Ministers and pot-bellied security personal trip over each other trying to keep up with her. She cuts through the veritable detritus that surrounds a sycophantic society, desperate and unsure as to what is her next move. She is good at this Hon-Hon walking methodology. It is said to be a way of speed and surprise, about delivering as promised, which the CPIM-ised Bengali bureaucracy had lost touch with. It is the notion of serving the people, serving the customer, meeting promised goals instead of joking about it non-challantly in various adda sessions (tea ‘n gossip while priming their cache of lethal weaponry) in 3 story mansions in Lalgarh surrounded by hemorrhaging tribal peasantry demanding basic constitutional rights. It is like a merry-go round session for a nation that has forgotten how to move and deliver. So far, the Hon-Hon tactic seems to have impressed quite a few people. What if she turns up at a government office at the ungodly hour of 11 AM, when everyone has barely begun to arrive? Or how about a Police Station at 10 AM, where the duty officer is reading Ganashkati, the CPI(M) daily or Sangbad Pratidin, while a retinue of people are waiting in an adjacent room to file their First Information Reports?

Mamata Banerjee has gripped the city like a giant spider in a white sari; hovering over Bengal like an escaped genii. Not a day passes without the TV channels and newspapers, giving their audience a minute by minute description of her daily Hon-Hon patrolling routine. She points, she smiles, she namashkars, she shows irritation, she points again and orders people around to take immediate action on pensions, on crooked pictures in Art galleries and poor waiting rooms in institutes. She has the energy of a hurricane in comparison to the roly-poly cotton balls that masqueraded as working class heroes for 34 years.

She ripped down a 34 year old moronic “left” empire, that had converted the concept of Leftism into a stolid, corrupt, misogynist, posturing, in-effective, hollering conglomeration of Bengali middle class title-seekers, just as the upper caste and Brahmin tax collectors did during the British Permanent Settlement era. Screw the poor, unleash gangster politics, bend over backwards to appease criminal corporations and known ore-snatchers and snatch the land of poor minority peasants (whose emancipation they themselves, thumping their chests, had declared some decades ago as their great Land reform miracle) and finally infeudalizing the entire state apparatus with their gawking yes men and women. The new Talukdars, Rai Bahadurs, Munshis of the last 34 years were the enforcers of the CPI(M), as the upper castes had been during British rule. The British practiced their own colonial form of “rational rule”, mediating between the native “rajahs” and the CPI(M) used their Biker gangs and the completely indoctrinated Police Officers to jerk around the aboriginal people of certain districts of Bengal, who only wanted some basic rights. People talk about Singur, Nandigram and Lalgarh, as the only crimes of the CPI (M). The only reason why they lost! Why have people stopped remembering Marichjhapi and the rape, murder and burning of Tapasi Malick?

Now, Mamata Banerjee in spite of all the accusations of erratic behaviour, strange pronouncements and strange political affiliations on her part, does seem to have a game plan. Behind the Hon-Hon run, that she has so well perfected, she has collected some progressive folks, well-known articulate thinkers, planners, experienced economists and philosophers, who wish to “change” things. Who are these people? What is their class outlook? Who do they represent? What is the change they want? No one seems to know. Do they want to bring in genuine sustainable development or another injection of neo-liberalism swathed in bullshit slogans like Ma Mati and Manush ? (The mother, the soil and the Human Being, whatever it implies). Do they want to bring in the same discredited policies of the IMF and the World Bank or do they want to introduce some sort of a social democratic welfare state, with the chains of graft, corruption and bureaucracy, broken and severely contained? Everyone is talking about reviving Bengal. (After all no one can get rid of the inherent corruption of the Indian State, No Baba, No Mama! As the rest of India seems to be so convulsed with.)

Shades of someone we know in the White House? Who shattered the dreams of a lot of his followers within two years of taking office? Mamata has shown some of the same propensities. Promising change, fairness, equity and strangely enough and identically like Barack Hussein, who came on the scene flashing his toothy good humor and ear-to ear rhetoric promising paribartan a la american. Yesterday, interestingly, her government declared that easy tapping of phone lines will no longer be possible. Something Barack flipped and flopped over and could not put together. That’s a small snatch of fresh air, really. She also announced that she is having a hard time finding qualified IAS and IPS officers. No wonder there! She is looking for non-groveling humans. She also declared that any physical attacks on the opposition by her Trinamool henchmen would be handled by an impartial body. Something which the CPIM lied about and twisted facts around and could never commit to do, as recently as a few months ago when the Netai massacre happened.

What is however important about this strident style, is that it may just be waking up the Bangali conservative Leftist out of his confidence-bound stupor of thirty four years. And in the background is a strange mix of personnel, from corrupt old Congressmen from the SS Ray era, former Naxalites, current left of centre anti-globalization politicos, some IMF-leaning structuralists and very simply some naïve hooligan enthusiasts with no ideology whatsoever. This Hon-Hon style, however, seems to be raising the curiosity of even the 40% of the electorate that did not vote for her. But what will the Hon-Hon style really achieve? Now that Mamata has come to power, will she reopen all the issues from the past, so that a proper investigation is done of the methodical manner in which the CPIM infested the body-politique of Bengal? Will she examine how the entire level of education, sponsorship scandals and transfer raj that the CPIM created, be dismantled? Perhaps when all is said and done, this Hon-Hon style is a mere charade, a distraction to wean people away from the real fundamental social change that Bengal really needs.