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The perennial outsider

Harish Khare

Mamata Banerjee ... defiant. — Photo: V.Sudershan.

ON THURSDAY Mamata Banerjee, the Trinamool Congress leader, put on display somewhat unorthodox behaviour in the Lok Sabha after the Chair had rejected her adjournment motion on the subject of alleged infiltration into West Bengal from Bangladesh. The Speaker was perfectly correct in his ruling as the House had discussed the subject only last week. This is not, however, the first time she has displayed similar behaviour in the Lok Sabha. In her third term in the Lok Sabha, she was once so annoyed with the then Speaker (Shivraj Patil) that she declared that she would not enter the House as long as he presided over it. Ironically it took an intervention by her betes noires, Communist Party of India (Marxist) fellow-parliamentarians, to sort things out for her. Again, when P.A. Sangma presided over the Lok Sabha, she once threw her shawl at the Chair before walking out.

Ms. Banerjee's willingness to defy dramatically the prescribed authority in the House is a reflection of her very political persona: an outsider, perpetually railing at the established rules of the game. But she has the shrewdness to calculate that her defiance will be appreciated — even applauded — by this or that group that may have reason to be unhappy with the existing power distribution.

She was the first Congress person to rebel openly against Sitaram Kesri when he was president of the party. She was not only applauded by a section of the media but also encouraged by sections of the party that had already put final touches to the blueprint for his ouster. However, the party managers had hoped that Ms. Banerjee would be back in the Congress once Kesri was ousted. That did not happen. Once rewarded and empowered, the outsider does not easily submit to the restraint of rules and authority. This is also because the outsider remains in the thrall of his or her own moral posturing.

In 1998, the Bharatiya Janata Party was happy to enlist her in the National Democratic Alliance. However, she remained unwilling to be tutored in the niceties of collective working. When Tehelka unveiled its "expose" on arms dealers and their connections in the Defence Ministry, she was the first to occupy the high moral ground and demand the resignation of George Fernandes as Defence Minister. She thus set the ball rolling for a set of moves that could only seriously erode the Vajpayee Government's legitimacy. Mr. Fernandes could not be kept out for too long. Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee had no choice but to re-induct him as Defence Minister even before he could be given a clean chit by a judicial inquiry commission.

The perennial outsider does not care much for her or his electoral or political fortunes as she or he does not have much of a stake in the "system." The outsider thrives because the "system" continues to mollycoddle the rebel. For company, Ms. Banerjee has, for instance, Uma Bharti in the BJP. Ms. Bharti too tends to be uncomfortable with existing rules of the game. Ms. Bharti, it may be recalled, took on her party president, L.K. Advani, before a live televised audience but the same party president subsequently felt compelled to "rehabilitate" her. Just as the BJP is now batting for Ms. Banerjee in her defiance of parliamentary norms and etiquette.

The outsider takes pride in representing an unappeasable voice. But the outsider also does not want to sit permanently on the margins; he or she wants to "transform" the system, testing the limits of a democratic arrangement's willingness to accommodate the heretic. It is both the strength and the weakness of the democratic system that it can neither summon up enough ruthlessness to throw the rebel out nor can it domesticate totally the outsider. Ms. Banerjee, Ms. Bharti and other outsiders will remain part of democracy's enigma.

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