MS MAMATA Banerjee’s trouble are far from over. Wherever she goes, she faces public slur in a manner she had never expected. So scared she is of this public humiliation that she chooses to stay indoors all the time. But then there does come a time when she must step out -- like the one occasion when she chose to go visiting the family of a deceased worker of her now near-defunct Trinamool Congress (TMC). The moment people around the place realised that Ms. Mamata Banerjee was visiting the mourning family, they milled around the place, shouted slogans calling her ‘Chor’ (thief), hurled slippers and slung mud at her. By so doing, they were maligning Ms. Banejree’s image as TMC founder but also as a public figure who has fallen from popular grace. For any leader who has enjoyed a lot of public esteem, those insults were far beyond her ability to endure.

 

Ms. Mamata Banerjee -- who had possibly expected that public ire might have died down in the intervening period during which she did not stir out of her house -- realised how wrong she had been in her assessment of people’s mood. But then, this is a classic tale of how an arrogant public leader demolishes her own image in just a few short months once she lost power. In the process, she has also destroyed her own party -- which she had founded on her own -- so much that any redemption from that state would sound almost impossible.

 

A similar fate awaits Ms. Mamata Banerjee’s nephew Mr. Abhishek Banerjee, MP, whenever he appears in public -- even for his personal errands. A few other top TMC leaders, too, have had to face a similar situation every now and then when they appeared in public. Of course, Ms. Mamata Banerjee is upset. She has accused of a deliberate, conspiratorial and political arrangement behind the attacks. She is free to make her own assessment. But the very fact that the person who was Chief Minister of West Bengal for full three terms and ruled the State as per personal fiefdom has to face mud and slippers being hurled at her, also shows how unpopular she had made herself and her party. In her ire, she may never accept that common people have turned against her. Factually, however, voters rejected her at the hustings to begin with, and they are continuing to reject her even after the elections. No political leader has ever faced such a rejection in India since Independence. Within hours of her party’s loss in the legislative elections, Ms. mamata Banerjee’s party started falling apart -- into unrecognisable small pieces. No matter her anger, almost every leader or worker of some consequence started leaving the party.

 

Each such exit, each such desertion, gave the people a clear idea that the TMC was not founded on any strong philosophy or ideology. In other words, there was nothing in the party’s narrative to hold the organisation together once the glue of power vanished. So, Members of Parliament -- from Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha -- and Members of Legislative Assembly made a hurried beeline out of the party, making either individual or collective choices that suited their political survival. True, Ms. Mamata Banerjee fumed and fretted and shouted resolves to teach everybody a hard lesson. Yet, none of those made any effect on the party’s rank and file that were already engaged in the process of fleeing and finding other perches. Reviving the party from such dumps may never become possible for Ms. Banerjee. Of course, politics is a play of the possible. So, some elements may find aligning with her again worth the while. So, some attempt may be made to revive either the TMC or Ms. Banerjee’s political fortune in another form. Going by the present situation, such attempts appear nearly impossible. Ms. Banerjee may join some political group and stage a comeback. But those attempts, too, would prove only marginal, to say the least. Internally, she must be sensing this reality -- about which she may not be able to do anything.