India, March 17 -- It was decades ago when this columnist came across Mamata Banerjee. He was impressed by her forthright demeanour and simple attire, by the fact that despite being a Parliamentarian, she wore rubber sandals unselfconsciously. Although by then a well-known figure in the country, Mamata Didi, as she is known, lived in an unpretentious dwelling in Kolkata, not shifting to the much more ostentatious quarters she was entitled too. And yet, somewhere along the way, the Chief Minister of Bengal appears to have missed the central point of public life, which is to ameliorate the condition of the suffering. Mamata Didi opposes what, from 2019, ought to have been termed the Minorities Protection Act rather than the Citizenship Amendm...