Mayor Sovan Chatterjee digs in for a day, calls out wife’s ‘infidelity’

KOLKATA: Beleaguered

mayor

and Trinamool Congress leader

Sovan Chatterjee

, who resigned from the state cabinet on Tuesday, worked overtime from home on Wednesday, plotting and fighting simultaneous battles on two fronts —

political

and domestic — and appearing on a Bengali news channel to accuse estranged wife Ratna Chatterjee of “marital infidelity”, financial impropriety and of engaging “supari killers” to annihilate his “friend”, Baisakhi Banerjee, and her daughter.


Sovan’s accusations on TV were followed immediately by Ratna’s equally vehement denials (on the same channel), giving Bengal a reality showcum-soap opera unprecedented in its political history.

Sovan dug his heels in on the political front, refusing to resign as the mayor and staying away from the

Kolkata Municipal Corporation

headquarters, despite Trinamool chief Mamata Banerjee’s Tuesday’s directive asking him to put in his papers. “You will come to know about my stand in due course,” Sovan said on Wednesday, delaying his party’s efforts to redraw its organisational and legislative maps, all the time insisting that he had “undiminished faith in the CM’s leadership”.

On the domestic front, however, he was much more combative, shedding his months-long reticence.


‘Nonchalant’ Sovan may face expulsion from party

In a no-holds-barred, aggressive interview from his Southern Avenue home, which Ratna watched live on television at her Parnasree residence, Sovan said: “While I was busy with politics, I found to my dismay that a company called GCR had been floated. I asked my wife who Chiku was and she told me he was Abhijit Ganguly. My wife told me to my face that she was having an affair with him and I could seek a divorce if I wanted.” (Gopal is Ratna’s brother’s name.) Sovan also alluded to widespread rumours of his relationship with Baishakhi Banerjee, a university lecturer, and absolved her of any role in this episode.

Sovan’s using a television channel to take to the public his side of an essentially domestic quarrel indicates that this may only be the first act of an episode he would like to continue for some more time. The response from his party colleagues was predictable. Municipal chairperson Mala Roy waited at the KMC headquarters till 4pm for the mayor — or his resignation — to arrive and then left in a huff. “I have not received the resignation. There has been no intimation via e-mail either,” Roy said after the day-long wait. Trinamool chief Banerjee has called a meeting on Thursday to discuss the post-Sovan situation in the KMC.

His decision to defer his resignation from the mayor’s position came as a sharp contrast to his on-the-spur decision to resign from the state cabinet after getting a rebuke from the Trinamool chief. But his predecessor in the KMC, CPM leader Bikash Bhattacharya, did not see anything wrong in the delay. “I feel Sovan Chatterjee is well within his rights to take a thought-out decision. The CM cannot ask the mayor to step down. The mayor’s position is different from that of the council of ministers who continue at the CM’s (or the PM’s) pleasure,” Bhattacharya said.

But Sovan’s digging his heels in may isolate him further in the Trinamool. His “nonchalance” may also prompt the party to show him the door followed by a no-confidence motion in the KMC House meeting.

Sovan loyalists feel that, like many others, he too is waiting for the Trinamool to take disciplinary steps against him so that he can choose his future in some other party. State BJP leaders said Sovan was “in touch with their party”. But there are others who still believe that Sovan, once a Mamata Banerjee favourite, will pull back at the last minute.

Many feel Sovan has become more desperate after seeing estranged wife Ratna attending Kali Puja and Bhai Phonta celebrations at CM Banerjee’s Kalighat residence


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