Railways and rant ways

By Bachi Karkaria

Mamata Banerjee had already rolled out her bedding, and settled comfortably into her berth while many of her colleagues were still anxiously perusing the wait-list, or pushing their way into the cabinet. The DMK had briefly tried to dislodge her from her favored seat, but everyone, from corporate honchos to Marxist paunchos, knows that once Didi digs in her chappals, there is no question of flip-flops.

Mamata has the perennially crumpled look of someone who has spent the last 48 hours in three-tier non-AC compartment, but that is not the only reason why she should have been made railway minister. She is the perfect fit for a post which has usually been occupied by those who rant, rail, and happily derail. George Fernandes did the last-mentioned quite literally. Remember how, as railway union leader in the 1970s, he had lain down on the tracks during the locomen's strike?

In this election, Lalu may been as unceremoniously smashed as the kullads he introduced on trains, but throughout his five-year journey, his antics remained the surefire object of amusement. Mamata is no slouch in this department, despite the fact that her humorless image is the exact opposite of her predecessor's crafted buffoonery.

An unvarnished earthiness is just right for a ministry which symbolizes the great unwashed engine of the Indian nation. Madhavrao Scindia may have driven it ably enough from 1984 to 1989, but it was easier to associate him with his later portfolio of civil aviation. In much the same way, it's impossible to picture the suave Praful Patel's sharply cut ensemble getting sloshed with railway dal. Indeed, the only train he'd take is the Rajdhani.

Babu Jagjivan Ram came close to Lalu in terms of native shrewdness, but the earthiest of them all was Lal Bahadur Shastri. In 1956, he resigned as rail mantri, taking moral responsibility for the accident in Ariyalur which left 144 dead. Shastri had the bad habit of doing such things; he even immediately vacated his ministerial quarters despite not having a home of his own. Such absurd gestures were promptly dropped from the ministerial code.

Shastri won himself a lot of fans when he introduced these into the hellish third class compartment. Indeed, with one stroke of social engineering, he abolished the earlier First Class, which was swaddled in princely luxuries quite inimical to the ideals of a socialist India, and converted the prevailing Second Class into First. He also banished the 'Inter' which had interrupted the decline of the passenger from Second to Third.

Shastri was the organic man of the masses, not some politically sprouted 'son of the soil'. So it would be boorish to compare him with later leaders who presumed that garibi can be hataoed just by pressing a Delete slogan. Nor should Shastri's 'class action' invite parallels with Gandhiji's third-class travel, an operation with so much official baggage that it prompted Sarojini Naidu's famous remark on how much it cost to keep the Mahatma in poverty.

Abul Barkat Ataul Ghani Khan Chowdhury, all one man, was as much of a 'character'. He was dubbed the Malda Express during his tenure (1982-84) for doing what is the divine right of his ilk: promptly hitching their constituency to the literal gravy train. While even Mamata can't turn Jadavpur into a central railway terminus, she has already announced fast-tracking the Howrah-Ludhiana freight corridor project. To be fair, she has also prioritized J& K connectivity.

And she did rush a special train to Jammu-Tavi to relieve passengers so surreally stranded there on account of the Sikh sectarian clash in, of all places, Vienna, which had then inflamed Punjab and paralyzed its railways. Even the histrionically inclined Mamata may not have wanted such a fiery ( plus cyclone-whipped) return to the ministry, but you cannot deny that it was an appropriate re-entry for our currently reigning drama queen.