Opinion | Why Mamata Banerjee Behaved Badly With The President Of India

With a policy of non-cooperation set by the CM herself, it is not surprising that Droupadi Murmu was insulted in West Bengal and the event she graced was hindered

Mamata Banerjee’s administration has released a slew of letters from bureaucrats to show that it had communicated its reservations to the office of the President of India about the preparedness of the venue a few days before March 7.

This was the expected official response to the very visible anguish of President Droupadi Murmu about her visit to Darjeeling to grace the International Santhal Conference being sidelined by the Chief Minister, ignoring convention and protocol.

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Less official and shockingly less polite was the Chief Minister’s shrill verbal rebuttal of the President’s very heartfelt dismay. In a tone screaming contempt, disdain and sarcasm, Banerjee taunted the famously soft-spoken President for supposedly not speaking out on a series of issues and basically accused her of exaggerating the extent of the breach of protocol as if she was sparring with some political opponent, not the person who holds the highest office in the country.

An honest mea culpa from Banerjee – citing presumably good reasons for skipping attendance as protocol demands if not innate good manners – would have gone a long way in assuaging the President’s hurt feelings. It may have even mollified the Santhal community, who have good reason to take the President’s feelings personally as she belongs to their tribe too. Instead, Banerjee displayed the kind of derisive behaviour that is generally ascribed to upper caste bias.

And then Banerjee followed it up by releasing West Bengal’s correspondence with the staff of Rashtrapati Bhavan, as if that justified the breach of protocol and insult to the office of the President as well as to the incumbent herself. Whether the event organiser is a private entity or an official one, the President of India’s presence mandates that the CM of the state concerned or a senior minister make themselves available to welcome the august dignitary at least at the airport.

A Governor is also supposed to welcome the President of India to a state. But as CV Ananda Bose suddenly resigned the day before and the new Governor RN Ravi is only expected to arrive next week, that absence is inadvertent. However, the same cannot be said for the CM, now at the end of her third term in the post. Ironically, India’s second woman President was visiting West Bengal, the only state at present with a woman CM, a day before International Women’s Day.

The official letters do not tell the whole story – Banerjee’s belligerence is more indicative. According to media reports, the organisers originally wanted to hold the event at Bidhannagar near Siliguri as it has a large tribal population. As often happens now in West Bengal, the local administration allegedly refused permission to hold it at that location, so the event had to be held instead at Gosainpur which meant tribal participants had to travel much farther to attend.

The President alluded to that very fact in her speech saying that she was given to understand the original venue was congested and inaccessible and hence had to be changed. But when she decided to visit the original venue anyway to meet the tribals, she found that the event could easily have been held there. That raises the question of why the state’s denied permission, and indeed for not helping the organisers in the preparations given that the President was going to attend.

Opposition parties in West Bengal routinely find their requests for events denied by the state government. So much so that the Leader of the Opposition there, Suvendu Adhikari has made approaching the High Court standard operating procedure as the state administration routinely rejects all his requests for public events. It seems that the state government officials are so used to doing this, they did not make an exception even for an event to be attended by the President.

As for the CM and senior officials attending events graced by India’s highest dignitaries, there is one indicative precedent. On May 28, 2021, Banerjee rudely walked out of a review meeting on Cyclone Yaas chaired by PM Narendra Modi at Kalaikonda airbase; the then Chief Secretary Alapan Bandyopadhyay exited with her. The Centre served him a show-cause notice, leading him to resign. He was promptly resurrected as her “chief advisor", a post he still holds.

That act effectively erased the Lakshman Rekha between the state’s bureaucracy and politics, normalising and even mandating partisan decision-making with total disregard for rules of procedure that all IAS and IPS officers are supposed to live by. The recent elevation of the state’s former Director-General of Police to the Rajya Sabha by West Bengal’s ruling party just days after retirement further underlines this egregious blurring of lines between babus and netas there.

With this prevailing policy of non-cooperation set by the CM herself, it is not surprising that the Santhal conclave faced hurdles from the local administration. The absence of the CM and any senior minister or civil servant even at Bagdogra airport to welcome the President to West Bengal and Banerjee’s bellicose defence of her own outrageous breach of protocol are all indicative of a state that considers itself to be above the law, not to mention totally bereft of common courtesy.

Especially with assembly elections just around the corner, Banerjee should have jumped at the idea of showing proper respect to the first-ever tribal President of India. Tribals comprise around 7 per cent of the state’s population, the President’s tribe the Santhals being the largest of them, accounting for over half of all STs in West Bengal. And two areas in particular have a large number of tribals: Paschim Medinipur (48 per cent) in the south-west and Jalpaiguri (33 per cent) in the north-east.

With the inexorable continuation of the Special Intensive Review of voter rolls visibly agitating Banerjee, she should have been more mindful of the sentiments of all potential voters. Had she stuck to just releasing those letters – which also do not exonerate her actions but are at least couched in civil language – she could have avoided a charge of Brahminical disdain for Adivasi pride. But her sneering tone negated any chance of claiming “no offence was intended".

(The author is a freelance writer. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views)

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