Bamboos and backsides: Bhadralok 'horror' at Mamata is classist and sexist

Mamata Banerjee is Mamata Banerjee.

On NDTV the other night when asked why the West Bengal was fighting a CBI probe into Saradha tooth and nail when Odisha’s Naveen Patnaik and Assam’s Tarun Gogoi were not, Trinamool’s Derek O’Brien smiled and said that with all due respect, Naveen Patnaik was Naveen Patnaik and Tarun Gogoi was Tarun Gogoi but Mamata Banerjee was Mamata Banerjee.

Didi just proved him right.

At a meeting in Jalpaiguri, Mamata the Irrepressible wanted to express her annoyance with the CPM for going to Narendra Modi to rake up the Saradha issue. But Mamata Banerjee being Mamata Banerjee she decided to let fly some salty Bengali slang, a far cry from the genteel Rabindrasangeet she has spewing out of her traffic lights.

Nijera 34 bochhor khomotai chhilo. Kichhu kortey paareni. Aar jaara korchhey taader bamboo diye berachhe. (They were in power for 34 years and could do nothing. And they are shoving the bamboo (up the rear ends) of those who are doing something.)

Bengali bhadralok are aghast. For years they merely turned its nose up at Mamata because of her unpolished rough and tumble street-tough ways, but they tolerated her in a way they would not have tolerated a man from her class background. Now, to them, it looks like Didi is showing her class. The Telegraph pasted a bamboo curtain on its front page with a banner headline saying BAMBOO REPUBLIC – No word is too crude, no gesticulation too loud. And the copy smirks “Readers who insist on their right to know may turn to Page 8 – only if you must and you are aged above18.”

The bhadralok doth protest too much. Didi’s language was slangy, earthy and in bad taste but hardly X-rated. School students routinely say the algebra examination was a “total baansh”. In the lexicon of insults most of which relate to vile acts being perpetrated on mothers and sisters, bamboo is hardly setting the Hooghly on fire.

Should a politician, especially a chief minister, watch her mouth? Absolutely. No matter if she curses up a blue streak in private, should she maintain a certain decorum in public? 100 percent. But at least Mamata Banerjee was not talking about shoving that bamboo up someone else’s rear.

That makes her a little different from her own MP, Tapas Pal who has gone into cold storage ever since video clips emerged of him telling an election meeting that if anyone insulted the mothers and daughters of Trinamool workers, he would let loose his boys into their homes and they would commit rape.

It also puts her a shade apart from Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti whose haramzada if taken literally casts aspersions on their parenthood of a huge swathe of the population.

But Mamata’s remark coming on the heels of Niranjan Jyoti’s jibe also reveals not just our discomfiture about street slang in public meetings but our extra discomfiture when it comes from a woman. The coarse-mouthed male politician does not raise as many eyebrows as a woman with a loose tongue. A woman is supposed to be demure and ladylike and a woman in politics is supposed to keep up that facade. Mamata broke that rule. That’s her greatest sin. The front-page tut-tutting over her statement is really about her class and her sex.

However on the flip side that does not mean that women in politics can expect to treated with gentlemanly courtesy. Mamata is well aware of that. Her entire career has been dogged by slurs – ugly, personal, sexist barbs. In the 2011 campaign , CPM leader Anil Basu alleged Mamata Banerjee took money from America. But he phrased it in a way he would never have done if she was a man. He referred to a red light district and described Mamata’s Trinamool as a bhatar (client).

Basu had also once said after the Singur protests that Mamata “should have been pulled by her hair and dragged (home) to Kalighat and given a lesson for blocking a national highway.” She’s been called “Kalighater moyna” (the parrot of Kalighat, her neighbourhood). CPM general secretary Anil Biswas had sniffed that Mamata was jomero aruchi as in even the devil would not want to touch her.

It’s not just Mamata. In the rough and tumble of politics, any woman who dares to be a leader can look forward to a barrage of personal attacks. They might be called Didi or Amma or Behenji but that’s where the courtesy ends.

In 1989 in melee in the Chennai assembly, Jayalalithaa found her pallu pulled and torn by angry DMK leaders whereupon she vowed to only re-enter as the chief minister. BJP’s Shaina NC wondered if Mayawati was a “he or a she”. Mulayam Singh Yadav sneered at Mayawati as a “parkati aurat” (bob-cut woman) after she cut her hair short. When 200 of his party’s hoodlums tried to break into the room she was staying in in a state guest house, Mulayam sneered “Is she so beautiful that anyone would want to rape her?” Rahul Gandhi might be called Pappu and Narendra Modi derided as Phenku but those insults are still more about their intellectual faculties and political maturity rather than jibes at their sex, looks and love lives.

Mamata’s bamboo slip might betray her frayed nerves these days. Or it might be her idea of connecting with her audience. It’s not a shining “Friends, Romans and countrymen” moment in political oratory but it’s hardly the nadir of political discourse it’s being made out to be.

Sri Ramakrishna said you can reach God by many paths – the most important thing was to reach the roof whether by stone stairs or a rope or bamboo steps. “You can also climb up by a bamboo pole,” said the sage.

In these days of the Saradha scam, perhaps Didi just had the other Saradha Ma’s divine consort Ramakrishna and his wisdom about the many uses of bamboo on her mind.