As Mamata Banerjee took the megaphone under a bus-stop shed at the Esplanade Y-Channel on Tuesday afternoon, barely 500 people, many of them journalists and police, were around to listen to her.
This was just about 300 metres from the spot where, exactly 316 days ago on July 21 last year, she had addressed an ocean of humanity outside Victoria House, confident and at the pinnacle of her power.
The distance was negligible; the displacement total.
Through her nearly five decades in public life, Mamata has commanded crowds in Bengal through the sheer force of her personality. Even at her lowest point before the May 4 drubbing — in 2004, when she was left her party’s lone Lok Sabha MP — her loyalists would choke Calcutta’s streets at one signal from her.
On Tuesday, the new reality hit her first in the form of the Kolkata Police — her minions till four weeks ago — flatly refusing her plea for permission to gather at Rani Rashmoni Avenue.
She could hold a rally in the adjacent Y-Channel, only from 2pm to 5pm, and without microphones or a stage, the police said.
What followed was a claustrophobic scramble under the bus-stop’s metal shed, with an iron bench for hardly seven to eight people as the lone seating place.
A single car brought Mamata to the venue around 2.15pm, threading its way between police guardrails along the tramlines near Esplanade’s 184-year-old Tipu Sultan Shahi Masjid.
Chaos ensued, marked by frantic pushing and shoving among the video journalists, news photographers and a few hundred selfie-seeking onlookers.
At its peak, the gathering barely touched 700 people, a number that quietly thinned below 500 within 90 minutes. Aside from two local processions, of about 50 people each, joining in, the vast asphalt expanses looked largely bare.
Surrounded by a rapidly shrinking cohort of her old guard — represented by loyalists like Dola Sen, Madan Mitra, Nayna Bandyopadhyay, Kalyan Banerjee and Sobhandeb Chattopadhyay — the 71-year-old spent the afternoon struggling to stay relevant.
Conspicuously absent were the overwhelming majority of her MLAs, and the who’s who of the entertainment-culture scene that used to be a constant feature at her rallies till the other day. Sources said only 14 of Trinamool's 120 MLAs and MPs were present.
Clutching the megaphone, Mamata delivered a stop-and-start speech, between bouts of sloganeering, over a period of about half an hour.
She alleged the BJP had rigged the counting in 177 of the 294 Assembly seats. “Ladenge ya marenge,” she shouted into the loudhailer as she painted a dark landscape of post-poll violence, targeted the BJP government for a “planned assault” on her nephew Abhishek Banerjee, and claimed police intimidation of private healthcare CEOs to deny him trauma-care admission.
Mamata ended her speech saying the INDIA bloc would meet in Delhi next week. She left at about 6.05pm.
BJP leaders responded with mockery or a dismissive shrug.
“We have no concerns regarding Mamata Banerjee or her successor,” state unit president Samik Bhattacharya said.
“The people of Bengal have brought them down to the streets.... They are now merely experiencing the same things they themselves did: forcing the closure of Opposition offices, launching attacks and halting public meetings.”
Chief minister Suvendu Adhikari rubbed salt into Mamata’s wounds.
“Somebody sent a picture.… I didn’t know they were in such dire straits. A handful of people... not even 150. There were about 200 journalists. Had there been no journalists, the scene would have been even more miserable,” he said at Tarakeswar, Hooghly.
“They still have so many (42) MPs, Rajya Sabha and Lok Sabha combined. I heard that only three MPs and six MLAs showed up. The situation of ‘dol-ta’ (the party) has become like Falta,” he added to uproarious laughter from his entourage.
This was Mamata’s second notable public appearance outside her home since the May 4 results. At Calcutta High Court on May 14, she had got mobbed by a hostile group of lawyers.
On her way to the rally venue, a copy of the Constitution in hand, Mamata had stopped briefly to garland the B.R. Ambedkar statue on Red Road.