Mamata Banerjee

On August 9, the day Mahatma Gandhi had launched the ‘Quit India’ movement in 1942 (opposed by the Hindu Right), the entire opposition walked out of the Rajya Sabha in protest against the chairman’s ruling that disallowed the Leader of Opposition to speak about the chair’s jibe at Samajwadi Party MP Jaya Bachchan, who’s in her 20th year in the Rajya Sabha.

What started as a protest against a heinous rape and murder of a junior lady doctor in a government hospital in Kolkata attached to the famous RG Kar Medical College has snowballed into an unprecedented movement for justice and the safety of women. 

Narendra Modi has surely lost his cool after 48% of the voters of Bengal rejected him quite decisively in the recent state elections by sinking their fierce political differences. Then followed the first real thrashing from all sections that Modi received in his seven years as prime minister for his disastrous handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.

It is a pity that after managing to control the rates of infection, recovery and mortality from the coronavirus reasonably better than five other comparable metropolises, Calcutta now appears determined to tease its fate during Durga Puja. When the coronavirus appeared in tiny numbers, knee-jerk, unplanned, nationwide lockdowns were clamped down with a lot of drama, with politics and image-building taking precedence. The social media was inundated with hate-filled messages targeting West Bengal’s special incompetence in combating the pandemic, ignoring the fact that most other states were floundering as well.