“You can call me a fan of Didi,” smiled Lokkhi Banerjee, 40, of Bishnupur town. “I was a fan in my father’s house. And I remain so in my hu...
“You can call me a fan of Didi,” smiled Lokkhi Banerjee, 40, of Bishnupur town. “I was a fan in my father’s house. And I remain so in my husband’s house.”
Banerjee underlines that last bit since the rest of her husband’s family, like much of the town’s middle class, now leans towards the Bharatiya Janata Party. But she and her younger sister-in-law, Dolon, are Trinamool holdouts in the otherwise saffron Banerjee household. “We are in a democracy, right? We each can vote the way we like.”
Dolon, 32, who had till then let her older relative speak, nods: “Mamata stands by us [women], so we vote for her.”
Lokkhi and Dolon are not alone. Didi, or elder sister, as West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee is called, has a distinct female support base. The Trinamool leader has introduced the politics of gender in the state, using both the identitarian appeal of a female chief minister and, more significantly, hard-nosed gender-focussed welfare to attract Bengali women.
For the past two years, however, the rise of the BJP has made things tougher for Banerjee. Even as the Trinamool tries to emphasise the gender identity of Bengali women, the BJP has highlighted their religious identity as part of its Hindutva...