From Times Archives: The Bengal Tigress–still stalking its prey

Reams of newsprint have been expended on her since 1984, the year she shot to national prominence with an astounding Lok Sabha poll victory over Marxist stalwart Somnath Chatterjee in Jadavpur. The mercurial Mamata is the darling of the print media, an object of envy for the senior West Bengal Congress leaders, a thorn in the flesh of the Left Front government, and a rallying point for all the anti-Marxist forces in the state.

Mamata is no stranger to violence. A child of the turbulent ’80s, she was, as a girl in ponytails, exposed to the depredations of the Naxalites in the early ’70s. Politics, too, is in her blood. Her father, a freedom fighter, was a committed Congress worker. Later, as an active member of the Chhatra Parshad, the students’ wing of the Congress, she clashed frequently with militant SUCI activists at Jogmaya College. Incidentally, it was on the street in front of the college that she was hit on the head with an iron rod by the brother of a CPM leader, Badshah Alam, in August 1990, as she was leading a Congress rally to protest a hike in bus fares. The blow was grievous and the injury was deep. She regained consciousness four days later, and had 26 stitches.

The then Prime Minister, Mr Rajiv Gandhi, who bore the expenses of her treatment, appointed her the president of the Youth Congress even as she lay in a hospital ward.

Mamata has managed to keep the trappings of power at bay. She got a telephone connection as many as three years after she became an MP. In Calcutta, she still doesn’t have a car of her own. Nor has she bought herself a portable generator, a status symbol for all those in power in a city that is powerless for hours every day.