This is from the Teelgraph calcutta


From Jatin Chakraborty to Pinarayi Vijayan 25 years on, Usha Uthup is again up against a sneering Left leader, fighting to protect her dignity as an artist.

The Calcutta-based singer has been seething after the Kerala CPM chief publicly associated her programmes with drunkenness and chaos at a party rally on Thursday.

Uthup today said she would write to CPM general secretary Prakash Karat and Jyoti Basu “to register my protest” against Vijayan’s remarks in Kottayam, Kerala, the home state of Karat and her own husband. Yesterday, she had described the Kerala CPM secretary’s remarks as “unfortunate”.

Vijayan was chiding drunken, noisy rallyists who had interrupted chief minister V.S. Achuthanandan’s speech shortly before the commotion forced the meeting to be called off.

“This is not a programme of Usha Uthup. The excitement is understandable but discipline has to be there. Do you think you can do this at a CPM meeting, such drunken hooliganism?” he had said.

“I am shocked,” Uthup told The Telegraph over the phone. “I sang for Nelson Mandela, Vajpayee… you name any leader, I sang for them.”

She added: “My audiences have always been disciplined and well-behaved. I don’t understand what he (Vijayan) is talking about.”

The controversy carries echoes of another in 1983, when the late RSP leader Jatin Chakraborty, the PWD minister in Jyoti Basu’s ministry, had termed Uthup’s music apasanskriti (decadence) and his party disrupted her programmes in Bengal.

Uthup had later come out with a song that spoke of her resolve to carry on singing and demanded that she be shown the respect due to artists.

“I have been singing in Bengal, a CPM-ruled state, for decades. Have you ever heard of hooliganism at my programmes?” she asked today.

Uthup recalled that about eight years ago, just before a concert in Kochi, the police had sensed unrest among the audience and nudged her to appeal for calm.

“The crowd behaved soon after,” she said.

The singer has deep personal ties with Kerala. “I am married to a Malayali and both my children were born there,” she said.

She regularly holds soirees in the southern state, judges a music contest on a Malayalam channel and features in advertisements. She played the mother of film star Mammootty, a CPM sympathiser, in Pothan Vaava.

In Bengal 25 years ago, the RSP youth wing had organised protests outside her venues – over Basu’s objections. Chakraborty himself once drove straight from Writers’ Buildings to join a demonstration before Rabindra Sadan, forcing a soiree to be cancelled.

“I had joined Jatinda in the protests,” recalled the current PWD minister, Kshiti Goswami, also an RSP man. He said Uthup later met Chakraborty and sorted the matter out.