Mamata Banerjee is trying to remind Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee that she has been kept on hold too long. Without a portfolio two and a half months after being appointed a minister, she has shot off a letter to a Lok Sabha official surrendering her MP telephones.That’s not the first unorthodox signal the perennial rebel has sent, or the Government turned a deaf ear to. Mamata is not accepting the Cabinet minister’s salary for the past three months, she has not appointed any of her allotted 17 personal staff members, and she is moving around in her aide’s old Fiat.Her logic is that being without a portfolio she is not contributing to the functioning of the Government. ‘‘I don’t have any right to those telephones, so I am surrendering them,’’ she told The Indian Express.Mamata has not even ordered any printed stationery for herself after joining the Union Cabinet. So the letter addressed to R.B. Mittal, Liaison Officer, Telephones, at the Parliament House annexe has been typed on an All India Trinamool Congress letterhead and is dated November 24, 2003.In the letter she informs ‘‘Mittalji’’ that ‘‘I would like to bring to your notice that since I have taken oath as one of the Cabinet Ministers on 8th September, 2003, I am supposed to surrender the facilities provided to me as Member of Parliament (Lok Sabha).’’ A Union minister’s requirements are taken care of by the Cabinet Secretariat, and once sworn into the Cabinet, an MP has to forego the facilities he or she enjoyed as a parliamentarian.‘‘I would request you to kindly withdraw the telephone connection No 2485 4500 (installed at my Kolkata residence for internet connection) and mobile telphone No 9868180064 with immediate effect,’’ Mamata has mentioned in the letter. She has also demanded that Mittal send her bills for the telephones installed at her Kolkata and New Delhi residences. Her aides pointed out that she won’t take any undue favours.Mamata is trying to prove a point. She is trying to suggest she is in a sort of uncharted territory—a no-man’s land. Having been made a Cabinet minister, she has lost her status and privileges as an MP. Neither would her sense of morality permit her to accept her Cabinet minister’s privileges when she has not been given a portfolio.And the Cabinet minister enjoys a number of perks. If Mamata accepted all her due privileges, she could have made limitless calls, furnished her flat (the ceiling is around Rs 1 lakh), got the minister’s official car, received a salary of Rs 38,000 and obtained endless J-class flight tickets. But Mamata keeps making her own personalised political statements by showing how austere she is. So she has never, even when she was the Railway Minister, accepted an official car. She had preferred being driven around in her aide’s green Fiat. The Union Minister can also ask for an official car from the state government in her home state but Mamata would think it too demeaning to do that of her sworn enemies, the Marxists. She has always, even as a minister, travelled Y class.The telephone surrender comes from a pouting Mamata surprised that the Prime Minister, whom she keeps praising as the most acceptable politician in the country, has left her in the lurch for such a long time. She has not yet made up her mind to join the smaller alliance of non-BJP parties that George Fernandes is trying to broker. She has told the JD(U) that she is not keen on a merger but can consider being an ally.Probably, it is in this belligerent mood that she has lodged a token protest by fielding six Trinamool nominees to fight the BJP as well as the Congress in Rajasthan and two more from Karol Bagh and Paharganj in Delhi.
