In late November 2025, West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s convoy was blocked on Jessore Road by the grieving family of Pritam Ghosh, a road accident victim. His relatives alleged that while his body lay in the morgue of Barasat Medical College, one of his eyes had been removed. Facing a volatile crowd, Banerjee, who is also in charge of the health ministry in Bengal, reverted to her most recognisable political reflex. She stepped out, promised a government job for a family member, financial aid, and a probe into the “missing eye” allegation.

Within 24 hours, the hospital formed an inquiry panel, a first information report was lodged, and the victim’s mother received an appointment letter for a Group-D government post. On local television, she profusely thanked Didi – the name by which Banerjee is called – for the intervention.

The tragedy was grotesque, but its political handling is instructive. Barasat Medical College is a state facility under a portfolio held directly by Banerjee. Yet there was no admission of the larger fact – that an alleged organ theft reveals a deep rot within the state’s mortuary system. That this is characterised by poor surveillance, dismal infrastructure and security failures, and the dehumanisation of bodies in custody. Instead, the optics centred on the chief minister personally “rescuing” a family with a job and a cheque.

This is the Mamata Banerjee crisis-management model. It responds to structural failure not with reform but with a transactional mix of financial compensation and employment to defuse anger before it metastasises.

This same attempt was visibly made but failed in the case of the rape and murder of a young doctor at the R.G. Kar Medical College last year. When the victim’s parents rejected standard compensation and demanded accountability, Banerjee publicly announced that her government was ready to pay Rs 10 lakh to build a memorial in their daughter’s name. Once again, the response was framed as a compassionate financial gesture rather than a serious reckoning with systemic failures in hospital security and policing.

For the most part of her regime, the Mamata Banerjee government’s reaction to crises of any kind, whether natural disasters, civic negligence, political bloodshed or corruption scandals, has followed this predictable toolkit. On-the-spot compensation and vague assurances of justice reduce each crisis to a personalised bargain between the state and one victim family. It was seen in the case of Kamduni gang-rape and murder incident in 2013 and in the cases of communal clashes in Murshidabad in 2025.

After Kolkata’s heaviest rainfall in decades in September 2025, which saw at least 10 deaths mostly due to electrocution, Banerjee announced Rs 2 lakh for each bereaved family. She blamed the Union government for floods, pressured power supplier CESC to pay Rs 5 lakh more to victims' families and promised state jobs if the private utility failed to accommodate them. The optics were of a compassionate leader fighting a negligent utilities provider, yet this conveniently bypassed the accountability of the civic body which is being run by her party for over 15 years now. There was no public roadmap for fixing unsafe urban infrastructure, no independent safety audit, and no timeline for penal action against the officials responsible. 

Weeks later, devastating floods and landslides killed more than 20 people in North Bengal. Banerjee announced Rs 5 lakh for each victim’s family, promised a contractual government job for one family member, and pledged a state-funded Mahakal temple. She termed the floods “man-made,” blaming Bhutan, while sidestepping the state’s own role in checking deforestation, illegal sand mining, and encroachment that are degrading the region's environment.

The same formula marks her handling of political violence. After the Bogtui massacre in 2022, where villagers were burned alive reportedly by local party men, Banerjee eventually visited the site with cheques, appointment letters, and promises of house reconstruction. While some local leaders were arrested, there was little effort to reform the nexus between local party structures, police, and administration that had made such an atrocity possible.

In the School Service Commission (SSC) recruitment scam, after the Supreme Court cancelled thousands of illegal appointments, Banerjee launched the “West Bengal Livelihood and Social Security Interim Scheme 2025”. Dismissed staff were to receive monthly allowances of Rs 20,000 - Rs 25,000, framed as humanitarian support. Instead of repairing the institutional architecture so such a scam could not recur, the state used the exchequer to subsidise the fallout of its own corruption.

While ex-gratia payments are common in Indian politics, this model under Banerjee stands out for its frequency and overt political deployment. The central tension is a glaring conflict of interest. In cases involving the health ministry (like in Barasat and RG Kar Hospital) or the police (as in Bogtui), Banerjee is the minister in charge of the failing institution. When she hands a job to a family grieving a state failure, she is essentially settling a claim against her own administration out of court, and using public money to silence a plaintiff.

More importantly, this model silences the demand for reform. Public outrage that usually forces institutional reckoning is defused by immediate restitution. By swiftly converting a crime into a compensation claim, the state effectively tells the family that their loss is personal and the payment is final, rather than acknowledging a public failure that requires systemic correction.

The Barasat “missing eye” case is a distilled version of this pattern. A shocking allegation inside a government hospital, the kind that should trigger an uncompromising examination of the health system’s ethics, oversight and culture, is met with the same toolkit. 

The convoy stops, the leader steps out, a job and cheque are promised, an inquiry is ordered and the cameras move on.

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