Author: Sandip Roy 
Publication: Firstpost.com
Date: November 18, 2014
URL:   http://www.firstpost.com/politics/the-incredibly-shrinking-mamata-didis-delhi-jaunt-reveals-her-lost-status-1808733.html

“I am a small fry. I am a commoner,” said Mamata Banerjee in Delhi during the Nehru 125 celebrations when asked about leading a Federal Front.

To her chagrin, many might have taken her at her word.

Mamata Banerjee usually arrives in Delhi as SuperMamata out to shake the pillars of power. She grabs national headlines with eye-popping ideas like proposing a President Manmohan Singh. She leaves coalitions on her own terms, keeping even the Prime Minister dangling till the last minute.

But her current Delhi trip is clear proof of how the mighty have shrunk. She seems more a dutiful poor cousin paying courtesy calls instead of a power player setting the cat among the Lutyens pigeons. She was seated in the audience not on the main stage at the Vigyan Bhavan ceremony for the Nehru commemoration — a missed opportunity by the Congress to at least have a photo-op anti-BJP alliance if not a real one. She socialised with sworn enemies Sitaram Yechury of the CPI(M) and D Raja of the CPI. She skipped the Sonia Gandhi lunch and popped in to LK Advani’s house to inquire after his ailing wife. She met with Arun Jaitley to check in on him after his surgery. “It is our culture to stand beside people in their bad times,” she explained.

The question is who is standing by her in her bad times and for Didi it’s bad times in spades. Saradha. Burdwan. Newly minted BJP minister Babul Supriyo. Trinamool vs Trinamool feuds. A Trinamool-backed mob attacking a police station. A disgraced MP attempting suicide in jail and hurling charges at her. No wonder the woman who once overtly snubbed Manmohan Singh when he went to Dhaka to discuss Teesta water sharing now sounds conciliatory about a Land Boundary Agreement with Bangladesh to swap enclaves as long as there is “ proper process” and “rehabilitation package.”

The irony is this should actually be the best of times for Didi. Trinamool has consistently met almost every electoral challenge since coming to power in 2011 whether it’s by-elections or panchayat polls. She’s poached from the Congress, decimated the Left and can claim that Bengal resisted the Modi wave in the 2014 elections.

But Mamata Banerjee finds herself reeling under wounds, many of which are self-inflicted. Though she protests her innocence around Saradha (because Saradha dates back to the Left Front years) and says it's the centre's job to check infiltration, she went out of her way to resist central investigative agencies. She wanted to play victim but ended up looking like someone with something to hide. And by turning control of investigation into a centre-state prestige issue she was forced to eat humble pie when the centre refused to blink.

That is an unusual position for the woman who once jumped up and down on the bonnet of a car. Jayalalithaa wields power without saying much in public. That’s why even after being forced to relinquish the CM’s post after the court ruling, Amma still casts a formidable shadow in politics. But Mamata has been a vociferous presence in our politics. While it might be strategically wise to not shoot off her mouth as is her wont, the silence of Mamata is so unusual, it makes her appear meek and chastened. The Red Queen who once barked “Off with her head” looks more like the harried White Rabbit these days.

The BJP meanwhile is going to town claiming that Trinamool is on the rampage against its members. Even more damning, it’s claiming that the BJP workers who have been killed in Bengal are Muslim. That’s a double whammy for Didi. On one hand the BJP wants to prove that its appeal is not just with Hindus. On the other hand it wants to tell Mamata that she cannot take her Muslim vote bank for granted.

And to her discomfiture, Mamata understands that she’s inadvertently paved the way for BJP into Bengal. Once she did it as part of the Vajpayee NDA government. Now she’s doing it by her shrill opposition to the BJP calling it a party of “danga guru” as opposed to “dharma guru”. As BJP insiders chortle though they just have one MLA in the assembly (and he’s a very recent addition), every time Didi rants about them, their membership rolls spike.

As The Telegraph reports, according to someone seated close to them Mamata and Sitaram Yechury had a telling though unconfirmed interaction at the Nehru commemoration.

Mamata: BJP ke atkate hobe, ki korchhen apnara? (BJP has to be stopped, what are you doing?)
 Yechury: Apnader haath dhortei to eshechhey. Ki korchilen apnara? (It has come to Bengal holding your hand. What were you doing?)

“Who is Amit Shah? I only know of Vajpayee and Advani,” Mamata apparently tells Rajdeep Sardesai on Headlines Today according to a tweet from Sardesai. If Amit Shah holds a rally in her backyard and gets a few lakhs to turn out despite not having Modi on the bill, that might be empty bluster.

It does show however the surreal state of politics in Bengal. A party with one MLA and no track record looks like the chief opposition. And a party with an overwhelming majority looks like it's floundering with its back to the wall. The BJP is on an upswing but no one seriously thinks that Mamata Banerjee is endangered in 2016 yet.

But one image sticks out. When she arrived at the Kolkata airport to catch her flight to Delhi she found the Air India flight was delayed. All passengers had been informed about the delay but somehow not the CM. An upset Mamata gave the staff a dressing down and then stormed off to catch an Indigo flight. At one time it would have looked like the people’s chief minister catching the low cost carrier. Now it just looked somewhat tragic – one more humiliation to take on the chin.