Actor-director Aparna Sen disapproves of the way West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee reacts to the BJP’s slogans of ‘Jai Shri Ram’.
“Mamata Banerjee could be digging her own grave with her knee jerk reactions to the BJP’s Jai Shri Ram campaign,” the award-winning filmmaker told an English news channel on Tuesday. In the interview, the maker of 36 Chowringhee Lane had expressed concern about mixing politics with religion and nationalism with Hindutva.
Without mincing words the famed director said, “I don’t like the way our chief minister got out of the car and tried to stop them and used abusive language. That doesn’t behove her,” pointing out that Banerjee came in with a huge majority and had done some good work in West Bengal.
‘But I have to say all her reactions are knee-jerk reactions. She’s so impulsive. She doesn’t think before she does anything. If she aims to be the chief minister of Bengal for a long time, she has to start practising controlling her speech, controlling the way she talks, just the impulse to talk she has to control. She has to first think it out and then say what she has to say…take the advice of people around her, like Amit Mitra and Saugata Roy. She should not say the first thing that comes to her head,’ Sen elucidated perhaps what is uppermost in many people’s mind.”
On the ‘Jai Shri Ram’ chant, which has come to symbolise the intense Trinamool-BJP face off in Bengal, the director of award-winning film Mr and Mrs Iyer, which dealt with communal strife, said: “I don’t like it. Politics and religion should be kept completely separate. All problems start from equating politics with religion.”
Incidentally, the BJP in the state has decided to also chant ‘Jai Maa Kali’, which it feels will help reach a larger Bengali audience. “It is a democracy and people have the right to freedom of expression. If they chant Jai Shri Ram or Allah Hu Akbar or Joi Ma Kali you can’t stop them,” she explained.
But the problem, Sen told the channel, is Mamata Banerjee’s reaction to the slogan.
The ruling Trinamool Congress suffered a setback in the just concluded Lok Sabha election, winning only 22 of the state’s 42 seats. The BJP swept 18 seats, a clear indication of the deep inroads it had made in a state where it had managed only two seats in the 2014 parliamentary polls. The saffron party made the “Jai Shri Ram” slogan a centerpiece of its campaign once it became obvious that it touched a raw nerve.
The veteran actor also disapproved of Banerjee’s act of lashing out at people shouting “Jai Shri Ram” at her, caught in videos gone viral on social media. (UNI)
