Shikha Mukerjee | Short-sighted politics has unintended consequences

The public displays of righteous indignation by the parties opposed to Mamata Banerjee’s government in West Bengal, all of whom revelled in triumphant glee after the Supreme Court ruled that all 25,753 teachers and staff recruited by the West Bengal government through an examination to assess eligibility must be sacked, has shocked and distressed voters. Not all of them are committed to either Mamata Banerjee or the Trinamul Congress that she leads.

The primary concern of the upset voter is the eligible and the meritorious as well as the ineligible have been left stranded, after the verdict sacking all recruited teachers. Had the Opposition been a little less blinkered and short-sighted, it would have taken pre-emptive action and unveiled a well-considered rescue plan in anticipation of the Supreme Court’s decision, which only confirms the Calcutta high court’s decision in 2023.

Instead of rejoicing that Mamata Banerjee’s government has been publicly branded as corrupt and hoping the blow to her image will be the last straw to break the almost magical bond that ties her to West Bengal’s electorate, the Opposition should have thought one step ahead. And that is where the Opposition, comprising the BJP, CPI(M) and Congress, as parties waiting to sweep the next election and seize power, seem to have failed the trust test with potential voters.

By ignoring the unintended consequences of the Supreme Court’s sack verdict because the selection examinations were “vitiated by manipulation and fraud”, without having plans in place on how to resolve the problems that must follow, these parties have revealed themselves to be incompetent, insensitive and not credible as reliable alternatives to Mamata Banerjee’s government, with all its flaws and tarnished record. Failure to have a corrective plan proposal to demonstrate to the victims and beneficiaries of the scam that the Opposition is capable of functioning as an alternative, a “shadow government” as it is described in the British parliamentary system, implies that the Opposition has absolutely no interest and wants no responsibility for cleaning up the mess that is of Mamata Banerjee’s making, as they allege.

The failure opens up a terrifying prospect, that the Opposition doesn’t have a detailed better governance map to offer voters, which includes rectification of the so-called “system” and the legacies of misrule. Instead, parties in the Opposition have assurances on offer based on which voters will have to decide which one sounds the least incredible, because by its very nature, assurances are not a credible basis for making risk assessment and choices.

The gap opens up an even more scary prospect: elections are like pigs in a poke, a confidence game where the buyer has no way of knowing beforehand the true value of the purchase. That argument extends beyond the turbulent borders of West Bengal to other parts of the country, where the Opposition offers itself as an alternative based on assurances of good governance and a track record in some other time and in some other place. That is why it makes sense when the BJP campaigns consistently that its “double-engine sarkar” model is best, and the Congress, equally consistently, talks about its past glory days, and the CPI(M) invokes the Jyoti Basu-Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee era.

West Bengal’s political crisis is a product of the quality of its leadership. In a country where unemployment, shrinking job opportunities and falling real wages in an economy that is growing sluggishly and inflation is a daily menace, political parties that don’t anticipate the distress that will follow when 25,753 people are sacked are undeserving of voter confidence. More so when the Opposition kicks the can in the direction of Mamata Banerjee by giving her a free hand on finding a solution to the problem, on the excuse that she is responsible for it, in the first place.

If each of these parties in Opposition – BJP and CPI(M) -- prepared separate plans of corrective action in anticipation that the Supreme Court would endorse the Calcutta high court’s decision that all 25,753 teachers should be sacked, then Ms Banerjee would have been under pressure. Instead, by abdicating their responsibility to West Bengal’s future, its governance and its voters, the Opposition has delivered to Mamata Banerjee a blank cheque that she will certainly fill and encash in the next election, due in 2026.

The Opposition and the judiciary failed to include in the now- revealed complicated canvas of corruption the desperation of young, educated people, with few opportunities, who felt the need to make a possibly unaffordable investment in ensuring they got one of the 25,753 appointment letters released by the West Bengal government for recruitment of secondary school teachers and staff. As the narrative was built, layer upon layer upon layer, missing are the following: one, about 23 lakh young people, mostly in their 20s, sat the recruitment test; two, just over 11 per cent were listed as eligible; three, how many of the young hopefuls actually paid to be recruited; and, four, how many ineligible, that is lacking in merit, candidates were recruited, like chaff hidden in the wheat?

The lack of political imagination and inability to adapt to evolving situations is why the Opposition in India is like music on a loop every time a crisis occurs. That is as true of the parties in Opposition in West Bengal as it is true of the parties in Opposition to the Narendra Modi government at the Centre and the parties in Opposition in other states. The result is a politics of take it or leave, giving the historically risk-averse Indian voter very little choice.

There have been moments when voters have taken the plunge, as in Delhi when Arvind Kejriwal, a then unknown quantity, won the 2013 and 2015 elections, and earlier in West Bengal in 2011 when voters ousted the 34-year-old CPI(M) government in favour of Mamata Banerjee, and in 1984 when N.T. Rama Rao exploded on the Indian political scene via a spectacular win in then undivided Andhra Pradesh.

Each of these new leaders of new parties made specific promises to get some things done, instead of boring voters with the same old spiel of ridding corruption and vague assurances of better governance. There is a larger lesson in the West Bengal experience: the Opposition, be it the member parties of the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance, or the BJP or any of its National Democratic Alliance partners needs to get down to specifics to fire up jaded and jaundiced voters, fed a repetitive diet of polarising identity politics of the “Hindu Khatre Me Hain” versus “Constitution Khatre Me Hain” kind.