KOLKATA: Mamata Banerjee doesn’t mince her words when it comes to taking on the Left Front. She is as vocal against her opponents as she is intolerant of her criticism.This is clear from her remarks on issues like gang-rape of a woman in tony Park Street, alienation of the intelligentsia from her or the arrest of a chemistry professor of Jadavpur University over a cartoon. When asked about the cartoon, Banerjee launched a vitriolic attack on her Left opponents, saying how the CPM was plotting with the Maoists to kill her, in league with the ISI and financed by North Korea, Venezuela and Hungary.“They have given me the death sentence, and every day they are spreading this superimposed photo on Facebook, on Internet or the e-mail through some false, camouflaged name,” she told Washington Post.Washington Post’s Simon Denyer has called Mamata the biggest obstacle to liberalization in India. “She spent her life fighting communists but is the biggest obstacle to economic liberalization in India today. She is the leader of a small regional party but wields more power than the prime minister,” Denyer writes in an article published on Monday.US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had recently met Mamata and referred to the “common bond” she shares with women who have broken through barriers of discrimination and braved the fire of electoral politics.The Washington Post article puts this in perspective, describing Mamata as the only woman who has risen to political power in South Asia “without being the widow, orphaned daughter or former girlfriend of an established leader”. The article takes a deeper look at Mamata and her policies beyond her persona, “eager to topple a political establishment.”Denyer writes: “The 57-year-old Banerjee — determined, resolutely populist and hardworking, yet eccentric and intolerant of dissent — holds the balance of power in India’s coalition government and has used that political might to huge effect. Time after time, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s efforts to introduce economic reforms have foundered because of Banerjee’s opposition.”Denyer adds, “To some, she also personifies a fear that politics will fragment to such an extent that India becomes almost ungovernable, that populists pandering to local interests will block important policy decisions.”Denyer then quotes Mamata saying: “We are not Marxist or capitalist, we are for the poor people. Our policy is very clear: whatever policy will suit the people, whatever policy will suit the circumstances, whatever policy will suit my state.”The article describes the state’s communist backdrop saying militant trade unions became so powerful during the Left government’s rule that they virtually ran factories in this state of 91 million people. And then it adds on Mamata, “She remains popular among the poor, but her populist decisions and growing intolerance of dissent have alienated many middle-class Bengalis who had welcomed her victory a year ago.”It concludes that it is her distrust of criticism, her sense that anyone who dares to oppose her is part of some vast communist conspiracy that has done the most to alienate the intelligentsia in one of India’s foremost cultural centres.