Mamata Vs Modi, Part 2

It has been a stormy first month in office for Mamata Banerjee in her third term as West Bengal chief minister. The BJP top leadership seems to have taken the election defeat to heart and has kept up the pressure on her government. Multiple central teams have descended on the state to “review the law and order situation” and investigating agencies seem to have suddenly woken up to scams that have dragged on for years.

- Romita Datta

The latest in the ongoing fracas was the Centre’s recall of West Bengal chief secretary Alapan Bandyopadhyay, and Mamata’s ‘appeal’ in a public letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi asking that the order be withdrawn as the bureaucrat was needed in Bengal. Of course, that didn’t happen and the chief secretary has now officially resigned and has been reappointed as Mamata’s chief advisor for the next three years (he’s also facing disciplinary action by the Centre).

Mamata’s troubles, though, started the very day, or to quote her, “the very minute” she took oath on May 5. Even as governor Jagdeep Dhankar, in his thanksgiving speech, was curtly reminding the Trinamool Congress (TMC) chief of her raj dharma, outside the Raj Bhawan, the opposition BJP was staging a dharna against the post-poll violence and the “debilitating law and order situation” in the state.

A day later, on May 6, a four-member team from the Union ministry of home affairs (MHA) arrived at the state secretariat, Nabanna, and held meetings with senior officials before fanning out to the trouble-torn districts. Meanwhile, another front opened up with the governor sanctioning the CBI prosecution of four TMC heavyweights including two current ministers (Firhad Hakim and Subrata Mukherjee) in the four-year-old Narada financial scam case.

There was worse in store—the four TMC leaders were taken into custody in an early morning swoop on May 17. Mamata was not prepared for this. The arrest of Hakim, who is also in charge of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation, especially at a time when there was a lockdown and the state capital was still reporting upward of 12,000 new Covid cases every day, led to much outrage.