CALCUTTA, SEPT 19: ``Don't forget to tell him that we call her Banglar Agnikanya (the fiery daughter of Bengal),'' a young man whispers in my ear as I explain to Marc Epstein of the French weekly, L'Express, the rise and rise of Mamata Banerjee in Bengal politics. It's Mamata's first day out in her very own Calcutta South constituency.Epstein is a bit baffled. He misses the ``fire'' in the simple-looking woman next door, clad in a simple saree, smiling and full of apology to her voters that she has come back to ask for their votes so soon. But it's all the CPI(M)'s and the Congress' fault, she says, they toppled Vajpayeeji's government which was doing so well.As her convoy inches forward along the narrow K P Roy Road, escorted by a slogan-shouting youth brigade, she stands on the Tata Sumo, waving at the people crowding the balconies and roofs. And she plays the neighbourhood didi (elder sister), asking children if they had a good day of kite-flying (which is part of the rituals ofthe day's Viswakarma puja). ``But take care,'' she says, ``don't fall off the roofs while flying kites.''The next moment, she chides her party boys, ``Move faster. Can't you move faster at least for a day? Look at me, I covered hundreds of miles across Bengal in these few weeks.'' She is flanked by former Congress MP and eminent jurist Debi Pal, who joined her party only a few hours earlier; Subrata Mukherjee, the former PCC vice-president who did so a few weeks earlier, and the old faithful Sovandeb Chatterjee.``This Subrata Mukherjee shouldn't have been allowed in her car. He's such a turncoat, a CPM stooge,'' grumbles Tapan Gupta, a resident of neighbouring Charu Market. He recalls that Mukherjee had sneered at Mamata so many times. ``Didn't the same Subrata once say Mamata would tear her own new saree to complain that CPM men have done it and try to get media mileage?''But today, Mamata is not complaining. Not even against Jyoti Basu. She plays the good girl back among her neighbours. It's leftto young party volunteers to distribute a leaflet of 22 limericks lampooning Basu and his son Chandan. Mamata herself is a picture of calm and composure, with not a trace of the familiar firebrand who called the police to revolt against Basu the other day or famously roused her crowds once threatening to hang herself in public with her own shawl.She doesn't need to do any of those things - not in her Calcutta South constituency. She had won it since 1991, increasing her margin of victory every time and trouncing Marxist veteran Prasanta Sur in 1998 by 224,000 votes. In fact, ever since she stormed into electoral politics with a surprise win against CPI(M) heavyweight Somnath Chatterjee in 1984 from neighbouring Jadavpur constituency, she has lost the elections only once, to Malini Bhattacharyya of the CPI(M) in 1989.This time, too, not even the most optimistic of CPI(M) leaders expect their candidate and vice-chancellor of Rabindra Bharati University, Subhankar Chakrabarty, to change things. CalcuttaSouth has the largest concentration of affluent people for any single constituency in the whole State. While the rich and the upper middle class have traditionally voted the Congress, Mamata's parent party, the rise of the BJP in Bengal has earned her the saffron sympathy also because of her party's alliance with the BJP.But it's not the rich and the middle classes alone; Mamata has cast her magic on the slumdwellers, the factory hands and the villagers in the rural Assembly segment of Sonarpur too. The reason is that she has emerged as the sole spokesperson of anti-Left politics in the State, courtesy the decline and fall of the Congress and the urban voters' growing disenchantment with the Marxists. The huge army of the unemployed forms the core of her brigade. So with ``the dream of a new Bengal'' as her main battle cry, she seems to be already out on a victory lap.
