KOLKATA: Beleaguered city mayor and Trinamool 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 television were followed immediately by Ratna's equally vehement denials (on the same channel), giving Bengal a reality show-cum-soap opera unprecedented in its political history.
Sovan dug his heels in on the political front, refusing to resign as Kolkata's 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 organizational and legislative maps, all the time insisting that he had "undiminished faith in Banerjee's leadership".
On the domestic front, however, he was much more combative, shedding his months-long reticence. 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 on 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.