KMC chairperson hopes to go to Delhi with Didi’s vote from prestigious seat

KOLKATA: The three-storied house on Bawali Mondal Lane in a quaint south Kolkata neighbourhood doesn’t have her nameplate. It does not require any. The locals make it a point to guide you right to her doorstep should you inquire about the address. The locals have a poser, too, for the scribes, “Mala Di MP hole ki ar councillor thakte parbe na? (If Mala Di becomes an MP, can she remain a councillor?)” Mala Roy has been the local councillor of Ward 88 for the past 24 years.


When you ask the question to Roy and her husband Nirbed Roy — also a Trinamool Congress leader — they break into a smile. “Several people have asked me this question,” she admits. Her husband reasons, “She can remain both. That is our understanding. The KMC elections are held by a state election body and the Lok Sabha elections are held by the EC, which is an autonomous body. If the party decides, she can remain both.” Trinamool leaders also reason the same, saying that the party needs her to be with mayor Firhad Hakim to steer the ship after Sovan Chatterjee’s departure.

Even 18 days ago, the Roy household never thought they would face such questions. They had slipped into a quiet routine, Roy shuttling between KMC and her local ward office and her husband looking after his work and academic interests. But, March 12 has changed that routine.

That day, a few minutes before the chief minister declared her party’s candidate list, Roy, the KMC chairperson, called her councillor colleague Ratna Sur, the party’s KMC chief whip, to her chamber to follow the proceedings on TV. At the fag end when the chief minister read out her name for the prestigious Kolkata (South) seat, it didn’t immediately register, till Sur nudged her to say, “Didi named you. You should immediately rush to Kalighat (the chief minister’s residence).”

Roy, till that moment, had no inkling that she would be contesting for Lok Sabha. That too in a seat which had sent Mamata Banerjee to the Lok Sabha six times in succession. When she had vacated it in May 2011 to become the CM, her handpicked successor Subrata Bakshi — the party’s national secretary — was elected from the seat twice. Banerjee, herself, is a voter in the constituency. All six MLAs of the assembly segments that constitute Kolkata (South) were state cabinet ministers, till Sovan resigned from the state cabinet. The seventh MLA is the chief minister herself. “I hope Sovan starts working (for the party) again. Partha Da (the state education minister) has taken the responsibility of both the Behala assembly segments on him,” she adds.

Roy’s quiet confidence — “we will better our win margin this time” — however doesn’t make her blind to the challenges ahead. She interprets them differently. She doesn’t agree to the logic that the large chunk of her constituency’s non-Bengali populace can lean towards BJP. A voter, she interprets, casts votes for someone who works for them. Nirbed reasons, “In the 2014 Lok Sabha results, some pockets did vote for Tathagata Roy (now the Mizoram governor). These were analysed ward-wise by the party leadership and civic delivery mechanisms were bolstered. The results were visible in two years. In the 2016 assembly polls, this trend was completely reversed.” A firm-believer in the work-to-win rationale, Roy had fought against a formidable CPM in 1995 to win with a margin of 580 votes in her first KMC election. Even when she wasn’t part of Trinamool, she never lost her ward polls. Her ward has been KMC’s model ward for several years now.

A three-time Vidyasagar College general-secretary, she was handpicked by former mayor Subrata Mukherjee as his MMiC conservancy and then drainage. In 2000, when Nirbed met Kanti Ganguly (senior CPM leader) in state assembly corridors, the latter reportedly told him, “Conservancy ta mahila der pokkhe sokto, tobe Mala parbe (Mala will be able to handle conservancy).”

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