Mamata Banerjee on Monday lambasted attempts at “teasing” her with Jai Shri Ram chants by some in the audience at the BJP-led Centre’s supposedly apolitical event on Saturday to honour Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose on his birth anniversary.
“Tell me, my mothers and sisters, if you invite me over for a meal at your home, would you call me and then tell me that you will give me one tight slap, that I should get out of your home? Would you ever do that? That is not our tradition, not our courtesy, not our decency,” said Mamata, at a party event in Hooghly’s Pursurah, in her first public reaction to the heckling.
Hecklers on Saturday used the chant — turned into an aggressive political slogan by the saffron ecosystem over decades — to greet the chief minister when she was asked to address the event at Victoria Memorial in the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Not once was the “Jai Shri Ram” slogan heard after she spoke, making it clear the intent was only to heckle her.
She branded the BJP as a marauding horde of bohiragawto (outsiders), expanding its acronym as “Bharat Jalao (Burn India) Party”. She accused the saffron camp of having added Netaji, a foremost national hero with near-divine status in Bengal, to the list of icons the BJP has “insulted” while trying to appropriate them.
“Netaji is everybody’s leader. Every single person’s, across the country. Even for many across the world…Such audacity! A handful of the gordho gaddar (asinine traitors)…ugro (acrid), gordho (asinine), dhormandho (zealots). They were teasing me. Sitting right in front of the country’s Prime Minister…They do not know me,” added the Trinamul chief.
As the Centre’s Netaji event was allowed to be painted with saffron politics, Mamata declined to speak there to protest against its politicisation.
Modi did not react to the heckling of the chief minister then or later. In his speech, he tried to associate Netaji with his government’s activities and highlighted Bose’s Hindu identity while omitting his secular credentials.
Not only have political rivals Left Front and Congress come forward in support of Mamata, so have eminent members of the civil society such as Netaji’s kin, eminent historian Sugata Bose.
The crowd at Mamata’s rally in Pursurah on Monday. Ananda Adhikari
Mamata on Monday said the hecklers did what they did because they didn’t know her well enough.
“If some mothers and sisters ask me to come and do their dishes, I would gladly do so…. But if you show me a bandook (gun), I will show you a sindook (chest) full of bandook. I do not believe in guns. I believe in politics. I will ensure a fitting response to this through politics,” she said.
Even as sections within the BJP — relatively aware of the state’s sensibility — came forward criticising the chanting at the Netaji event, members of various Sangh parivar outfits claimed there was nothing wrong with the chant at the event and mocked Mamata for her alleged aversion to the name of Ram.
On Monday, Mamata returned fire.
“Had you, instead, shouted “Netaji, Netaji”, I would have done nothing but saluted you, respectfully. Instead, what you did, you insulted Bengal, you insulted Netaji,” she said.
A Trinamul MP said Mamata would highlight the differences between the philosophy of Netaji and that of the BJP, pointing out it was an ideological descendant of Syama Prasad Mookerjee, leader of the Hindu Mahasabha and founder of (BJP’s predecessor) Bharatiya Jana Sangh.
A city-based historian said that on May 12, 1940, Netaji famously said in Jhargram: “The Hindu Mahasabha has deployed sannyasis and sannyasins with tridents in their hands to beg for votes. At the very sight of tridents and saffron robes, Hindus bow their heads in reverence. By taking advantage of religion, and desecrating it, the Hindu Mahasabha has entered the arena of politics. It is the duty of all Hindus to condemn it…. Banish these traitors from national life. Don’t listen to them.”
The historian also quoted from Mookerjee’s autobiographical writings, Leaves from a Diary. “Mookerjee wrote: ‘Subhas once warned me in a friendly spirit, adding significantly, that if we proceeded to create a rival political body in Bengal he would see to it, by force if need be, that it was broken before it was really born. This I considered to be a most unfair and unreasonable attitude to take up’,” the historian said.
Mamata had a message to potential defectors — that those looking to desert the party for the BJP before polls should do so immediately.
“Soon, they would all want back in, but they will never be allowed again…. The ones leaving know that they failed the people and would be denied candidature by the party anyway,” said Mamata at Hooghly, a district where the ruling party is a bitterly divided house. The BJP has been eyeing Hooghly to engineer large-scale defections before the election.
