Mamata Banerjee is on a tour of Incredible India. No, she is not promoting tourism, but trying to portray herself as a national leader, find alliances and make political friends, who will help her become the face of the opposition.
In the run-up to the 2019 elections too, Mamata Banerjee had visited multiple states. She had met Uddhav Thackeray in Mumbai in late 2017. She had even remembered to pay respects to Balasaheb a few weeks later. She had met Sharad Pawar in Delhi, in March 2018 where they made big statements about making an anti-BJP coalition. She had also met Naveen Patnaik in Odisha and attended HD Kumaraswamy’s much-hyped swearing-in ceremony in Bengaluru that year. No coalition happened. None of those leaders announced Mamata Banerjee as the face of the United Opposition, worse, nobody even announced United Opposition. It remained a media dream.
There was also a mega rally at Kolkata’s brigade ground before the 2019 general elections, where many of the opposition leaders had joined, signally very heavy ‘United Opposition’ vibes. But nothing much happened after that too, sadly.
United comedian alliance?
This time, the same attempts are taking a slightly different turn. Swara Bhaskar has apparently appointed herself as the announcer in Mamata Banerjee’s Duarbaar in Mumbai. She was seen earlier today introducing the Bengal CM to the comedians who were kicked out of gigs over the recent months for various fiascos and have collectively blamed it all on BJP and RSS, like Rahul Gandhi and Imran Khan do, almost every week.
#Watch| Actress Swara Bhaskar tells #WestBengal CM #MamataBanerjee in the interactive session in Mumbai, “There is a state which is distributing the UAPA and sedition charges as a prasad from a God we don’t want to pray to.” pic.twitter.com/oG756fiUpw
— Pooja Mehta (@pooja_news) December 1, 2021
Swara posed herself as a humble TMC employee with a fresh offer letter and introduced Mamata Banerjee to aspirants lining up for the HR round one by one. She pointed towards Munawar Faruqui, Agrima Joshua and some others like Aditi Mittal and claimed they are “risking their lives and careers” for the sake of telling stories. She even gave the example of Meryl Streep, who had apparently stood before the president-elect of her country and ‘not a hair on her head’ was harmed.
That is weird because all those people, including Mamata, Sonia, Rahul, and their minions like Swara, including all those so-called ‘comedians’ have been criticising the democratically elected PM of the country day in and day out, and not a hair on their heads have been harmed either. Heads are removed for different reasons and by a different set of people across the world. But people like Swara insist that that has nothing to do with religion.
It is a strange irony that these so-called ‘comedians’ do not ever dare to question the ‘Sar Tan Se Juda’ people. The employees of Charlie Hebdo office who got slaughtered in their office, Kamlesh Tiwari who had his throat slit inside his own house, or poor Lakhbir Singh who got dismembered and hanged from a metal barricade will not be hailed as victims by these ‘liberal’ comedians and entertainers, because that takes actual courage. Criticising a tolerant, liberal (the real kind) and democratic government is easy, and these people do plenty of that.
Irony of ironies
So-called comedians and actors who claim victimhood after their gigs get cancelled, or their movies flop, lining before Mamata Banerjee and hailing her as some sort of democracy-saver is probably the best ‘act’ they will ever perform, one that is actually hilarious, unlike their pathetic jokes.
Swara claimed the people she brought before Mamata are now ‘unemployable’, but how is that Modiji’s fault? Can it be because of the fact that they are really pathetic, maybe their jokes do not make people laugh? In the age of OTT, why would any sane person spend money to watch unfunny people make nonsensical statements insisting they are telling jokes and asserting that the public is morally obligated to pay them?
It is the same Mamata Banerjee whose government had hounded Ambikesh Mahapatra for years, a Jadavpur University professor who had shared a cartoon of Mamata Banerjee. The same Mamata who had jailed Priyanka Sharma, for sharing a meme that was neither offensive nor abusive. The same Mamata, whose party is behind the worst political violence in recent years.
Munawar Faruqui and his ‘liberal’ friends are going around claiming his shows are getting cancelled because he is a Muslim, which is laughable in a country that has the Khans ruling Bollywood for decades. Agrima Joshua had to apologise to MNS workers after her remarks over Shivaji Maharaj were criticised. Nobody has ever done anything to Richa Chadha or Kubra Sait, most people don’t even know who they are. Social media trolling is not the same as getting beheaded or getting gunned down by terrorists in your office because of a cartoon. Yeah, that is the truth. deal with it.
What next? The big comedy festival in Kolkata?
It is not understood what exactly Mamata Banerjee is trying to achieve by having these comedians and entertainers dance around her. They are definitely not useful politically, because we all know how spectacularly Kanhaiya Kumar performed in the Begusarai seat after Swara, Javed Akhtar and Shabana Azmi campaigned for him in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. For those who don’t know, he lost by over 4 lakh 22 thousand votes.
Are Agrima Joshua, Faruqui etc going to perform in Kolkata next? Is Mamata Banerjee going to include stand up shows by these people in the state government’s welfare programs? Or they are going to form a comedian political party and announce Gathbandhan with her? Even if they do so, Rahul Gandhi is already the shining star in that space. No one is gonna snatch the top political comedian status from him anytime soon.
Mamata Banerjee’s political attempts to rally up regional leaders in her support has borne little fruit so far. Of late, even the Leftist media has joined in the campaign, but there is no signal from 10 Janpath yet, and as we all know, as long as the Gandhi family is there, they call the shots.
“Woke, liberal secular comedians who claim to be speaking truth to power line up for a politician who jails people for sharing harmless memes”….It sounds like a satire headline, but sadly it is not.
