Let’s go back to the Bollywood eighties, for precisely no other reason than for the fact that the decade was slightly, ahem, vain. Imagine a minister, say Kulbhushan Kharbanda, visiting a hospital in a B-town; Nagpur? The media follows the minister -- really those journos in small-town India had no better stories than a minister visit those days. For byline stories, all they did all year was to sit on their backside for a minister to visit, hopefully impregnate a poor woman from a farmer’s family or take money from the money lenders who had gotten all the money in the first place from poor farmers, who would eventually be driven to suicide, which finally would start making news a decade later.
But that’s bunkum.
Anyway, minister visits hospital in full media glare, decides to walk into the ICU, with the media in toe, the conscientious ICU chief bars him, says all that jing-bang would create a chaos and cause problems. Minister is aghast: a minion like the doctor has the bloody gall to tell him off?
I did not invite the media, he says. And why would you not let them in? You surely have something to hide. Meet me at my office tomorrow.
Sorry sir, doctor pleads. With folded hands for effect, tears threatening to burst out. I have a few surgeries lined up tomorrow. It’s Friday -- my surgery day.
Bloody hell, minister barks.
On his way out, he sees two patients on stretchers. Did my presence create trouble for you? Are you getting any less attention?
The two were in too much pain anyway; all they could muster was, no sir.
Doctor suspended, screams the lead header the following day in ‘The Navbharat Times (they always showed NBT in those days; but you can take your pick of the paper. If it’s IE, just increase the headline by 10 more words: In wake of minister maelstrom, doctor gets the axe for insubordination. Or some such.)
Yes, the reason for the suspension is writ large on the wall, sorry NBT story: insubordination and misconduct, to quote from the report.
If Y Chopra was still an angst-ridden man of circa ‘Deewar’ in the 80s, he would have picked up on the theme and got the neighbours to catch hold of the doctor’s son and gotten them to tattoo on the teen’s hand: Mera baap bore hai. And M Desai in his elements would have killed the patient who the minister spoke to, and his son would have grown up to avenge the death.
Okay, let’s not get carried away with sappy scripts; those are different tales, to be told another day.
Fast-forward a few years. To May 26, 2011 to be precise. Change Nagpur to Kolkata, and the minister to a chief minister – Mamata Banerjee, to be precise -- and cut out the ICU bit (that was only for added drama). But the story still holds: why would you want to create a racket at a hospital?
The headline the day after (May 27) said just that (pardon the tongue in cheek reference to NBT and IE; for future naukri’s sake let this be official, I love both mastheads): suspended for “insubordination and misconduct” (The Telegraph).
How long will it take for the new chief minister to understand that administration is different from rabble rousing? That merely leaving your car once you near your office and starting to walk could be good for the TRPs, but a headache for the police and administration? That she is not merely putting her life at stake (that’s her own business) but putting many lives at stake since the situation could lead to a stampede? That walk-ins and walk-outs are part of the deal when you are in opposition; it’s a different ball game when you are in administration? That walking into government hospitals and checking about reasons for faulty radiology machines and patient convenience isn’t the smartest thing to do, because chiding those doctors and nurses in front of the patients would eventually harm their medication?
Mamata Banerjee, it seems, has been voted in, but it seems in her mind she is still the opposition in the state. She is the CM, someone should politely remind her that.
She needs to take time out of her busy schedule of firing and hiring and take on the muddy roads that lead to Nandigram and Singur, which now is under her administrative control. She cannot cry slogans from Kolkata, she cannot blame others. Jowab chai, jowab dao cannot be her slogan any more -- she has to take a call on the redistribution of land of the farmers, she cannot leave it for someone else.
She cannot be a liability for her own administration – she cannot do walk-in interviews in hospitals, she cannot walk out over a tiff.
Let's put this in perspective: the neurosurgeon concerned was hired to operate, not to entertain state guests during working hours. Banerjee might be accustomed to such treatment from her Tollywood buddies, but this is a whole new game altogether.
It’s still difficult to digest her last few words (as reported in the media) before she left the said hospital – “they always blame me for everything.”
But isn’t that what you wanted, Didi? To be the boss of West Bengal. Well, then, bosses are blamed for "everything", including the current mess that you have inherited.
One can just hope that she knows what she has taken on.
In one word, Banerjee has to grow up, and grow up quickly. She cannot cry foul any more. Her torn old white saree and her 34 years of struggle have got her the power, but to sustain it she needs to don a new avatar. While the Shatabdi Roys and Tapas Pauls of her glamour world can be cast in her puppet show, it needs to be seen how long they stay by her side after she puts into effect her pre-election manifesto: “Stop entry of big capital, domestic or foreign, in retail sector.”
(Amit Mitra is cringing.)
“No foreign capital in sectors other than high-quality technology and other industries, indispensable for the country.”
(Mitra cringing further.)
Opposing “construction of all shopping malls in Bengal”. (Shatabdi Roy cringes, worries where her next designer saree is going to come from.)
Putting such ideas into practice, now that she is running the show, could leave even her Men Friday Partha Chatterjee and Dereck O’Brien cringing!
I am sure Mamata means well with what she has done in the one week since taking oath as the chief minister, and I am not calling these actions her antics, though she has been doing them for the last 30 years and more. For the sake of the people in that state, I hope she gets well soon. Fingers crossed.
