Gallery Politics

The recent Salt Lake Stadium fiasco where iconic Argentine footballer Lionel Messi’s visit unravelled amid a welter of chaos and fan ire was yet another brazen display of the megalomania of the leadership of the ruling Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress (TMC).

Messi’s Kolkata leg brought with him the promise of joy for a city that has long treated football as both religion and refuge. Legions of his fans paid exorbitant amounts - up to Rs. 14,000 - for the chance of a lifetime to see the greatest footballer of his generation. What they got instead was a masterclass in TMC misrule. Messi was corralled into a tight ring of ministers, party fixers and VIP flotsam, barely visible to the crowd that had come for him. When this unqualified disappointment spilled into frenzied vandalism, the police responded with baton charges.

Kolkata’s Messi mess was political culture made flesh. Under CM Mamata Banerjee, public events have become private spoils, gargantuan photo opportunities for ministers, rent-seeking exercises for organisers and ordeals for ordinary citizens and fans. Messi was reduced to a prop in the ruling party’s ‘Khela Hobe’ carnival, surrounded not by players or children but by second- and third-rank politicians and their wives desperate for proximity to reflected glory.

Given that West Bengal is already sensing poll tremors, the Chief Minister’s response followed a well-worn script of shock and apology.

The deeper embarrassment is not that Messi event in Kolkata was mishandled, but that this outcome felt inevitable. His Hyderabad leg passed without drama. Mumbai will likely manage the same. It was in Kolkata alone that the event turned a celebration into a crude and grasping circus. That is because Bengal’s ruling class has internalised the idea that the State exists only to be consumed by ministers, their relatives, their courtiers. The fans were not merely forgotten but were considered utterly irrelevant.

Consider the small humiliations layered atop the larger betrayal. Water bottles were first banned, and then sold inside at extortionate prices. Tickets sold at premium rates for seats that offered no view. Security arrangements that protected VIPs but treated paying spectators as a nuisance. This is nothing if not feudal extraction.

West Bengal’s problem today is one of a feudal political ecosystem that rewards loudness over competence and theatrics over administration. Banerjee, who once promised to smash this culture, has instead perfected it.

What is most shameful for Kolkata is that a city which once prided itself on its cultural seriousness now makes heroes of political loudmouths and social-media grotesques.

The Messi fiasco has palpably exposed the ever-widening gulf between rulers and ruled in West Bengal. Messi will move on. But for his fans in Kolkata, the memories that will linger will not be of greatness glimpsed, but of betrayal endured. If this is Banerjee’s idea of ‘khela,’ then Bengal’s spectators may yet decide to change the rules in the coming election.