"Dilli chalo" thundered Mamata Banerjee at the mammoth traffic-choking rally in Kolkata on Thursday kicking off her Lok Sabha campaign. Trinamool was on top of the world. The panchayat polls had gone in its favour. The state's most famous intellectual Mahasweta Devi was back in Didi's camp. Mamata is worthy to be the next Prime Minister Mahasweta Devi told the surging crowds at Brigade Parade ground. She's the one she wanted to see on Delhi's masnad (throne) giving the whole affair a rather Napoleonic feel. Didi, pumped-up, told the throngs of the faithful "The alternative to Congress is not BJP. The alternative to BJP is not Congress. The alternative the country needs is Trinamool."
The one party she carefully did not mention is the one whose leader is being compared the most to her.
"Arvind Kejriwal is Mamata Banerjee with a muffler. And a moustache," quipped Suhel Seth recently on Twitter.
The vision of Kejriwal as Dada to Mamata's Didi is quite arresting in a cartoonish way.
There are clearly parallels between the two. Both came from humble backgrounds, not political families. They didn't have traditional political godfathers. Mamata rose through the ranks of student politics. Kejriwal was best-known as the bureaucrat whispering into Anna Hazare's ear.
Both became giant-killers in Indian politics, though unlike Kejriwal Mamata slogged in the opposition trenches for years. But journalist Divyanshu Dutta Roy writes he still had "a sense of déjà vu" while watching Kejriwal take his pledge "as a humble leader of a sea of humanity." "The 'common man' had won, Banerjee said and everybody said 'Hear! Hear!'" writes Dutta Roy.
Mamata Banerjee. Agencies.
The Left Front had looked unassailable in Bengal for years but in the drubbing of 2011, the chief minister Buddhadev Bhattacharya couldn't keep his seat. Even with the Congress in the doldrums no one had expected Sheila Dikshit to be humiliated so decisively.
And their first acts in power lived up to that down-to-earth aam aadmi image. Both are known for their frugal style of living, presenting a life of simple living as a sort of metaphor for clean governance. It's an appealing image in a time of ostentatious greed – the chief minister who eschews flashing red lights and oppressive security or the one who offers puffed rice and tea to visitors. Kejriwal stubbornly coming into work with a hacking cough, Mamata coming to Writers despite running a temperature all add to the image of a diligent chief minister, both dogged and working like a dog.
While many were scratching their heads over the prolonged wrangle about finding a house for Mr. Kejriwal. Rana Dasgupta, author of Capital says the symbolism does matter in a time when more than half of the police resources are devoted to protecting and surrounding the elite rather than solving crimes. "I think making a statement that that is not how you wish to live your life as a politician is enormously important," says Dasgupta. "I think this moment in which people have decided in favour of somebody who breaks the political rules, breaks the political equilibirium that we have seen so long is a statement of a great desire to re-imagine what politics is."
The problem for both Didi and Dada is in how they decide the rules should be broken. Kejriwal's recent dust-up and dharnas with the Delhi police have only brought back memories of Mamata Banerjee bursting into a police station in Kolkata in 2011 to force them to release two of her party members who had been arrested for rioting.
Of course, one difference is the Kolkata police is under Mamata. The Delhi police is not under Kejriwal. That's the point he was trying to make. So one was a gesture of browbeating. The other was a gesture of protest. Kejriwal's political future hangs by a fickle Congress thread and he needs to show he is not dancing to Congress' tune in exchange for their support. Mamata's numbers are secure for now.
But the tactics employed by both led @Ranjona to observe in a widely circulated tweet "Arvind Kejriwal now behaving like Mamata Banerjee – a permanent state of being in opposition even when you are chief minister."
Kejriwal should be worried about that. The very qualities that made Mamata a formidable opposition leader – streetfighting skills, outspokenness, a flair for dramatics – have come in the way of her as a chief minister. As CM she appears to leap before she looks, smells conspiracy in every criticism, and happily paralyses her own city with mammoth rallies as a show of strength and promises bigger ones to come.
As leaders who derive their strength from an undeniable mass appeal rather than backroom deals, they cannot resist the urge to keep grandstanding, as if they would prefer to rule from the streets rather than the secretariat. At her rally in Kolkata, Mamata dared the opposition to out-dharna her. "I've sat on a dharna for 15 days. I have done hunger strikes," she scoffed and then tossed out a challenge to her opponents. "Catch me if you can."
Kejriwal and Mamata's greatest commonality is something that's much undervalued in our society. In his book Grand Delusions, journalist Indrajit Hazra writes that when he first encountered Mamata in 1996 she had come by to the newspaper office where he worked and tied rakhis on the wrists of "slightly flabbergasted desk hands and reporters". "I was overwhelmed by how approachable she was and how she differed from the communist leaders in her sincerity and lack of formality." Kejriwal has that same common touch and approachability which has always been his trump card.
Yet Mamata in power quickly lost much of that approachability. Instead she became more and more imperious, apt to fly off the handle at the slightest insult, seeing Maoists under every bed, apparently impervious to common sense and reason, wasting the enormous goodwill she had with wanton profligacy. That should be a warning road map for Kejriwal as the Aam Aadmi Party flexes its national muscle.
Meanwhile AAP had better pay attention to the approaching eastern storm. Borrowing the most obvious quote possible for her national ambition, Mamata told the crowds "What Bengal thinks today, India thinks tomorrow." And then in the next breath announced that she herself was only interested in work. "I do not want a chair, I do not want power. We just want change in Delhi."
Come to think of it, that sounds a lot like a line out of the playbook of Arvind Kejriwal.
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