Back on collision course as Didi disowns, Mukul defends

THE STING visuals purportedly showing some top Trinamool Congress leaders accepting cash now threaten to revive existing fault lines in the party.

Barely four months after they had buried the hatchet, party chief Mamata Banerjee and her one-time lieutenant Mukul Roy have taken the first steps along a fresh collision course after Roy said Tuesday that none of the party members featured in the video were accepting cash for personal gains. This was in contradiction to Mamata’s open condemnation of the leaders in the video a few days earlier; she had said that had the video emerged earlier, she would have denied tickets to those leaders.

Roy’s defence of the leaders came at an election rally in favour of party candidate Biswajit Kundu in Kalna in Burdwan. “These people you see in the pictures are not the kind of people who would take money for personal gains,” he said. Later that night, he issued a statement reiterating the stand. “Doctored or manufactured video, that we still do not know. I know all these colleagues for a long time. They are not the kind of people who would take money for personal gain,” Roy said.

The expression of faith in the 11 people shot on hidden cameras — Roy himself is one of the six MPS featured and the only one who is not facing the parliamentary ethics committee being a member of the Rajya Sabha — has stuck a wrong note given that Mamata’s stance on the same issue had been that these were acts of personal transgression with no connection to the party.

The opposition has pounced on Roy’s statement. The ramifications are more likely to be felt within than without, however, given that Roy is yet to be accorded the stature that he once had in the party, until the Saradha scam unfolded. Roy, who was the national general secretary of the party, leader of the party in the Rajya Sabha and also the leader of the Trinamool parliamentary party, has not got back any of those posts and continues to sit in the last row of the Rajya Sabha where he had been relegated after he became the sole Trinamool leader to be called by the CBI in the chit fund scam and not taken into custody.

The alienation from Mamata had been rapid and absolute with the two studiously avoiding being even in the same city, before they mended bridges last December over dinner at the Delhi home of Mamata’s nephew Abhishek Banerjee, Lok Sabha MP. Until then, Roy had been seen as the key mover — behind the scenes — in the launch of a new political party that eventually did not take off; the repatriation is believed to have been to scuttle exactly that.

Taking advantage of Roy’s alienation, though, a new crop of leaders have emerged as the party’s faces in Delhi, with Derek O’brien leading it in the Rajya Sabha and also a new set of media spokespeople for the party including Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar (national secretary and one of the MPS in the sting now at the crosshairs of the ethics committee) in the Lok Sabha and Nadimul Haq in the Rajya Sabha.

Sources say even before Roy’s “open act of defiance”, there was tension between the two. The Trinamool chief did not take kindly to the removal of Kolkata police commissioner Rajiv Kumar at the behest of the Election Commission and viewed it as Roy’s failure to swing the EC’S opinion.

File Another showdown brews.