KOLKATA – Mamata Banerjee doesn’t mince her words when it comes to taking on the Left Front. She is as vocal against her opponents as she is intolerant of her criticism.
This is clear from her remarks on issues like gang-rape of a woman in tony Park Street, alienation of the intelligentsia from her or the arrest of a chemistry professor of Jadavpur University over a cartoon. When asked about the cartoon, Banerjee launched a vitriolic attack on her Left opponents, saying how the CPM was plotting with the Maoists to kill her, in league with the ISI and financed by North Korea, Venezuela and Hungary.
“They have given me the death sentence, and every day they are spreading this superimposed photo on Facebook, on Internet or the e-mail through some false, camouflaged name,” she told Washington Post.
Washington Post’s Simon Denyer has called Mamata the biggest obstacle to liberalization in India. “She spent her life fighting communists but is the biggest obstacle to economic liberalization in India today. She is the leader of a small regional party but wields more power than the prime minister,” Denyer writes in an article published on Monday.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had recently met Mamata and referred to the “common bond” she shares with women who have broken through barriers of discrimination and braved the fire of electoral politics.
The Washington Post article puts this in perspective, describing Mamata as the only woman who has risen to political power in South Asia “without being the widow, orphaned daughter or former girlfriend of an established leader”. The article takes a deeper look at Mamata and her policies beyond her persona, “eager to topple a political establishment.”
