Mukul Roy: The Strategist Who Institutionalised Political Horse-Trading in Bengal |
Senior West Bengal politician and former Union railway minister Mukul Roy passed away in the early hours of Monday, February 23, following prolonged illness.
At the time of his death, he remained a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) member of the legislative assembly (MLA) from the Krishnanagar Uttar constituency. This status was technically preserved by a Supreme Court stay on a Calcutta high court judgment that sought his disqualification under the anti-defection law after his high-profile re-entry into the Trinamool Congress (TMC) in June 2021.
Spanning five decades, Roy’s career was defined by his rise as Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s primary strategist and closest confidant. He served as the 32nd Union railway minister and was twice elected to the Rajya Sabha. The ambiguity of his final political loyalties serves as a fitting reflection of the mercurial and transactional nature of his career, one widely seen as having ushered in a culture of political horse-trading to Bengal.
A TMC master-strategist
As the primary architect of the TMC’s grassroots expansion, Roy was the silent engine behind the 2011 wave of change that ended 34 years of Left Front rule. While Banerjee was the face of the movement, Roy was the master strategist, meticulously stitching together local alliances and weakening the Left’s organisational grip.
Roy’s greatest strength lay in his lack of ideological rigidity, a trait that allowed him to stitch together a seemingly impossible coalition to dismantle the Left Front. He, alongside Suvendu Adhikari, served as a critical bridge between the TMC and ultra-left Naxalite factions during the Singur and Nandigram movements, leveraging their grassroots networks to destabilise the CPI(M)’s........