Maverick Minister in India Is as Perplexing as She Is Powerful

Piyal Adhikary/European Pressphoto Agency

Mamata Banerjee, the head of the West Bengal State, in April.

KOLKATA, India - When Mamata Banerjee, a 5-foot-tall dynamo in flip-flops, finally defeated the Communists last year after decades of misrule here, she became one of the most powerful but unpredictable politicians in India. Now the country is left to guess whether she will announce on Tuesday that she intends to try to pull down India's governing coalition.

Ms. Banerjee is the chief minister of West Bengal, a state more populous than Germany, and she leads a regional party with 19 ministers in Parliament, a crucial block of votes for the governing United Progressive Alliance. Indeed, she is so influential that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton paid her a special visit on a recent trip to India, a highly unusual honor for any regional leader.

On Thursday and Friday, the government pushed through several sweeping policy changes, including one that would allow Walmart and Ikea to set up shop in India. Ms. Banerjee has repeatedly opposed plans to open India up to more competition. She is in some ways more leftist than the Communists she replaced.

But while she has vowed to protest the changes, it is unclear whether she will go further on Tuesday and push for early elections after she meets with her party leaders. As is often the case with Ms. Banerjee, her public statements are often contradictory.

“We are not supporting these anti-people decisions,” she posted on her Facebook account on Friday. “We are very much serious about these developments and ready to take hard decisions if these issues are not reconsidered.” But the next day, she announced several times at a rally: “We don't want to topple the government.”

The 15 months of her administration in West Bengal, of which Kolkata, also known as Calcutta, is the capital, demonstrate just how hopeless it is to try to predict how Ms. Banerjee will behave.

Not long after taking office, she announced that a rape victim was lying even though the police found evidence supporting the victim's allegations. She demanded the arrest of a farmer after he asked her a question about rising fertilizer prices.

She angrily marched out of a televised session with college students after accusing those in the audience of being Maoists. Her government arrested a university professor after he forwarded an e-mail with a political cartoon criticizing her. She has claimed that there is a global conspiracy to kill her.

Many are still hopeful that Ms. Banerjee, who is often referred to here as “Didi” (elder sister), will be able to reverse her state's long decline and contribute to India's resurgence. But even her allies are beginning to wonder whether her volcanic temper, off-the-wall statements and increasingly nasty battle with the news media will be her undoing as chief minister, a position akin to that of a governor.

“She never picked up the skills to hold her anger in check so that she can administer and govern,” said Laveesh Bhandari, director of Indicus, an economic research firm.

And there is a palpable sense from top ministers in the central government of what seems to be a bad case of “Mamata fatigue.” When asked about Ms. Banerjee's impending decision, Renuka Chowdhury, a spokesman for the Congress Party, the primary group in the governing coalition, said: “We remain optimistic, while we appreciate her limitations and compulsions.”

Ms. Banerjee declined requests for an interview.

In her place, Amit Mitra, Ms. Banerjee's finance minister, dismissed the many controversies she has been involved in as little more than a tempest in a teapot.

“These are concerns only for the English-speaking upper class,” he said. Referring to the Communists, known locally as the C.P.M., he added: “The C.P.M. would have beat that farmer to death. He got away because she believes in democracy.”