New Delhi: Trinamool Congress leader Sudip Bandyopadhyay’s sudden arrival in the national capital and his open rebellion against party leadership is making headlines since he has been known as a close confidante of party Chairperson Mamata Banerjee and a staunch supporter of his leader in Parliament for decades.
However, he is also known to have gone against his supremo on earlier occasions as and when he considered it appropriate for himself and his constituency. In September 2003, Mamata did not take kindly to Sudip meeting the then Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani and had him temporarily expelled from the party. It was then said that he had met the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader to formally thank him for the Union government allotting a significant fund for the restoration and upkeep of Swami Vivekananda’s birthplace.
However, it led to a political storm within the Trinamool Congress, where the party Chairperson assumed it was as an attempt at seeking a Cabinet berth.
Incidentally, as an MP, Bandyopadhyay was allotted accommodation in official quarters at Delhi’s Baba Khadak Singh Marg on the same floor as that of Mamata. In fact, with the doors open across the landing, one could see well inside the small corridor of the other apartment.
The friction, however, led to his shifting elsewhere. But not forever. Sudip always had his way around Mamata; the two later reconciled, and he returned to be made Minister of State in the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government led by then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. By that time, Mamata walked out of NDA – for the second time, after 2001 – and allied with the UPA. The bonhomie was back, and Sudip was again back in contention.
When Sudip was arrested by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in 2017 in the alleged Rose Valley scam, Mamata lent her voice of support for him, calling it “vendetta politics”. The party also cited the senior leader’s active participation in several agitations in protest against alleged corruption and the then demonetisation.
Meanwhile, the rise of Mamata’s nephew Abhishek Banerjee in the party led to frictions and factions, where it was alleged that the younger leader was against septuagenarian leaders contesting elections, albeit with the exception of the supremo. Abhishek had also replaced Sudip as the party leader in Lok Sabha after Mamata expressed concerns over the septuagenarian leader’s health.
Sudip, say insiders, was not amused, but the seasoned politician knew when not to speak. Ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha election, sources suggested that Sudip got Mamata to prevail over her nephew’s purported decision of keeping “senior” candidates out of the fray. So did at least two other sitting party Parliamentarians, also in their seventies or thereabouts. Abhishek, by then a decisive voice within the party but prevailing only in private, was said to have not taken too kindly to it.
Sudip, being the seasoned politician and seen as a polite face in the party, chose to wait. That wait may have come to an end this week. His importance in Trinamool lay in the fact that he had the ears of his supremo and was among the members of her closest circles for years.
He was also among the few senior leaders in the party who was with Mamata during her days in Congress and had exited with her when she founded the Trinamool Congress in 1998. And that proximity is said to have further been cemented after the exit of Mukul Roy, once considered Mamata’s right-hand man and then the de facto number two in Trinamool Congress. But every equation within the party changed with the entry of Abhishek Banrejee, now considered the heir apparent.
