Chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s personal jibe about Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s wife on Thursday has triggered a vicious cycle of personal attacks culminating in BJP workers forcibly applying sindoor on female police officers in Hooghly’s Chinsurah on Friday.
The controversy erupted following Modi’s rally in Alipurduar on Thursday, where he, without naming Mamata, sharply criticised her government and her Trinamool Congress regime. In response, Mamata held a press conference to counter what she called Modi’s “politicisation of Operation Sindoor”.
During the briefing, she crossed a line with a personal jibe: “Remember that every woman has respect. They take sindoor from their husbands… Modiji is talking this way. You are not every woman’s husband… why don’t you give sindoor to your Missus first?”
Realising the inappropriateness of her comment, Mamata immediately apologised while blaming Modi for provoking her. “I am sorry to say this. I shouldn’t get into all this. But you are compelling us now to open our mouths,” she said.
BJP escalates
Instead of accepting the chief minister’s apology, BJP leaders saw a political opportunity. State unit chief Sukanta Majumdar and leader of opposition Suvendu Adhikari launched a coordinated retaliation that targeted not just Mamata’s alleged personal conduct but also her humble origins and socio-economic background.
Majumdar, a junior Union minister, mocked her for “having grown up in a slum,” while Adhikari threatened to distribute “damning excerpts” from a controversial book about her personal life. True to his word, BJP workers distributed copies of these excerpts during protests on Friday.
The situation reached a disturbing climax in Chinsurah, Hooghly, where BJP women workers forcibly applied sindoor on female police officers who were trying to disperse their protest. The incident drew criticism even from within the BJP’s own state unit.
Misogynistic turn
Trinamool’s women’s wing chief Chandrima Bhattacharya condemned the BJP’s approach, saying their remarks reeked of “patriarchy, aporophobia, classism, and misogyny”.
“They have brought sindoor to the political arena to sell it. Don’t do it. Women are warning you,” said Bhattacharya, who also serves as the state’s finance minister.
A woman also filed a formal complaint at Tollygunge police station against BJP’s Kaustav Bagchi for a social media post referencing the controversial excerpts.
Political culture dip
The episode highlights how personal attacks and identity politics have increasingly dominated Bengal’s political landscape, with both major parties crossing traditional boundaries of political propriety and raising serious questions about the health of democratic discourse in the state.
Political observers expressed dismay at the deteriorating quality of Bengal’s political discourse. Senior analyst Subhamoy Maitra noted that while political incorrectness existed during the traditional Left-Congress rivalry, the current situation represents something far worse.
“What the BJP and Trinamool have now brought to the table cannot be oversimplified by excuses of absent social media or barely-there mainstream media,” Maitra said. “The constant vigil of mainstream and social media now should have encouraged greater propriety in public conduct.”
He pointed out that neither Modi’s estranged marriage nor the allegations about Mamata’s youth are new revelations. “Modi has been accepted as Prime Minister with people knowing about his estranged wife. Mamata has been accepted as chief minister even after the book has been in circulation for quite a while,” he said.
Maitra underscored that such personal attacks were unimaginable during previous eras when leaders such as Rajiv Gandhi, Manmohan Singh, Jyoti Basu, or Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee held office.
“What has undeniably happened is a decline in general quality. Society, en masse, now seems to enjoy these things. The kind of politics most people now seem to believe in, have an appetite for, that is what they are being fed,” he observed.
