Mamata Banerjee last sat in the Lok Sabha in 2011; reports say she is eyeing a return but Ganguly has denied helping her with a key move towards that goal. (PTI )
The former Indian cricket captain, who has cult hero status in Bengal in particular, issued a clarification on Saturday, saying he is not a player at all in this game.
Mamata’s many moves
For Mamata Banerjee, 71, a reshuffle came first amid a widening rebellion, partly centred against her nephew, Abhishek Banerjee. He will remain the national general secretary for now, the party has decided. Senior leaders Derek O’Brien and Dola Sen have, however, been appointed as joint secretaries “to assist him”, party MP Kalyan Banerjee said after a TMC national working committee meeting at Mamata’s Kalighat residence in Kolkata on Friday.
She has rebuilt the state unit around her loyalists, while rebalancing Abhishek’s powers. Former minister Chandrima Bhattacharya replaces an “unwell” Subrata Bakshi as state unit president. New vice-presidents and state general secretaries come in. The youth, women’s, trade union and farmers’ wings were also overhauled.
But the scale of the revolt is evident in the numbers, as the assembly speaker has already recognised a bloc of 58 rebel TMC MLAs — out of its total 80 — as the principal opposition in the 294-member House. Ritabrata Banerjee and Sandipan Saha, both expelled by the TMC at the start of the week, have been named leader and deputy leader of the opposition. “We are the real TMC now in the assembly,” Ritabrata Banerjee has said. The rebels say they would keep Mamata as “principal adviser” but want nothing to do with Abhishek.
The party plans to move court against the speaker’s decision. Loyalists have also hit back at the rebels publicly. “It has barely been a month; even the election ink on their fingers has not faded… and they are doing this,” said Kunal Ghosh, the state unit spokesperson. “They won because of Mamata Banerjee’s name… But the party workers are still with us,” he claimed. But merely eight of the 80 MLAs were at the Friday evening meeting at Kalighat.
Will she fight for a Lok Sabha seat?
Given the dwindling numbers, Mamata’s own standing may depend now on having a seat. She lost her assembly contest to the BJP’s Suvendu Adhikari, who is now CM.
One route back for her is a Lok Sabha by-election. A prominent Bengali newspaper reported that Baharampur MP Yusuf Pathan, another former cricketer, may be asked to step down for her.
That is where Sourav Ganguly’s name came in, as Anandabazar Patrika reported on its June 4 front page that he had been asked to carry Mamata’s message to Pathan, urging him to quit; and that Pathan had refused.
On Saturday, Ganguly issued a signed statement to “all the media houses” seeking to knock down that story and wider speculation.
“I was never requested/asked by Ms Mamata Banerjee to convey any message from her to Mr Yusuf Pathan, whether to step down from his parliamentary seat, as alleged or otherwise or at all,” he said.
“I never approached or contacted Mr Yusuf Pathan with any such or other request/message. As such, the question of Mr Yusuf Pathan responding in the manner as alleged in the article does not and cannot arise,” he added.
The reports of such a move by him, he said, were “in reckless disregard of the truth”.
Ganguly, who has turned down political offers before, asked the media not to run such claims without checking them. Neither Pathan nor the TMC has responded.
Yusuf Pathan, a slog-over specialist in his time as a batter, won Baharampur in 2024 by beating veteran Congress leader Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury by a significant 85,000-odd votes. Originally from Gujarat, he had a Bengal connection via his stint for the Kolkata Knight Riders in the IPL.
Mamata Banerjee last sat in the Lok Sabha in 2011, resigning her seat a day before she was sworn in as chief minister in May of that year, having ended decades of Left Front rule in her home state.
She first entered Parliament in 1984 on the Congress ticket and got served seven Lok Sabha wins in total. In between, she left the Congress and founded the TMC in 1998.
She held ministerial office under three prime ministers. She began as Union minister of state in PV Narasimha Rao’s Congress government in 1991. Under BJP’s Atal Bihari Vajpayee, she became railway minister as TMC’s undisputed leader, and later served as coal minister. She aligned with the Congress and became railway minister under Manmohan Singh as well, before taking the CM’s chair.
