BJP's Roopa Ganguly is doing more harm than good for Bengal
Bengal shaming has become a fad with the state BJP leaders. In a bid to attack the incumbent Trinamool Congress government and its state of affairs in Bengal, majority of the saffron party leaders are taking the route of criticising the state and in turn, unknowingly and ignorantly, hurting its people and the Bengali sentiments.
Result: The state leaders are losing out on the acceptability factor. The latest to have made this faux pas was Roopa Ganguly, who at one time was nursing the ambition of being the foil to the Trinamool Congress chief.
Roopa, a national award winner and known for her much-acclaimed role of Draupadi in the Mahabharata, said last week that women coming to Bengal from outside and not as state guests wouldn't take a fortnight to get raped in Mamata Banerjee's Bengal.
She was perhaps trying to highlight how unsafe Bengal has become to women tourists in the current Trinamool Congress regime. But the interpretation, which naturally came to hog all the limelight, was that Bengal as a state and Bengali men as its inhabitants were a bit of a risky proposition for women.
Hell broke loose and naturally so. Roopa in her theatrical avatar has not only exaggerated things but has gone on to say something that was demeaning for the state and its people. Politicians, intellectuals and the ordinary Bengalis were asking for Roopa's apology.
What followed was worse. Roopa continuing in the same breath said that what she uttered indeed needed to be corrected, "leave aside fortnight it wouldn't even take a week to get raped in Bengal." "At a time when BJP national president Amit Shah is focussing his attention on Bengal, such comments are not only irresponsible but immature," said poll analyst and professor of Political Science, Biswanath Chakrabarty.
"But none from the BJP thought of any damage control. None came forward publicly to apply ointment to the singed Bengali pride in out of desperation to score some quick points in the national circle," added Chakrabarty.
With Locket Chatterjee enjoying all the limelight for her aggressive political style, Roopa is the last person to sit back watching. She's springing back with her theatrics. The day BJP was supposed to lay siege to the Lalbazar police headquarters, Roopa emerged on the scene with a tricolour turban, worn in Swami Vivekananda's style.
She looked every bit of a fashionista. As expected, she raised the bar of expectation by playing with the pitch and tenor of her voice, with right sprinkling of emotion, and in a typical theatrical and melodramatic style came across as one who would pull off a great performance.
But, true to her vocation, she was acting all the while and every word she spoke, every facial muscle she twitched was art at its best. She feigned illness or may be she fell ill, without the slightest provocation, scuffle or resistance from the police, who were rather much too protective about their childhood fantasy - the Draupadi. The women cops lent her the shoulders, literally, and Roopa sunk on the streets on a mid-summer afternoon.
Instead of marching her way to the Lalbazar, as the BJP had tomtomed, by breaking the police cordon and barricades, she chose the shortest and easy route possible. Roopa courted arrest, complaining of bouts of pain, and ended up spending a night at the Lalbazar lock-up, accepting the hospitality of the city police headquarters as a VIP guest.
A night in the lock-up, a rare and first-time experience in her life, had been a real "eye-opener" for her - or shall we say an eye-wash for the people? She came out of the lock-up the next afternoon with a marigold and tube-rose garland dangling around her neck, a heroine's welcome of sorts, promising to jot down her experiences in the jail with a stinking loo, no proper washroom, cockroaches and mosquitoes as company and a frugal meal of rice and soyabean curry as dinner after midnight.
People are awaiting that book, especially if it aimed to bring some rectification in the functioning of the correctional homes. Meanwhile, she has enough correction to make in the art called politics.
(Courtesy of Mail Today.)