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Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

ThePrint On Camera Videos In Pictures

Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

How ex-Bengal CM Siddhartha Shankar Ray shaped today’s race in Bhabanipur

It was Siddhartha Shankar Ray who had first taken notice of an adolescent Mamata Banerjee during a youth congress rally. Ray stopped his car and got out to hear her speak.

There is a scene from my early years that plays out in my memory’s theatre, with the quality of a period film. In the 2000s, Mita Walia, a Congress worker, storms into the anteroom and announces, in breathless Bengali, with a distinct Punjabi twang: “Manu Da’r flight land koreche!’—Manu Da’s flight has landed. Ashfaque, his political secretary, stubs out his fifth consecutive cigarette. Heaps of ‘chai-er bhaand’ or earthen tea cups pile up in the corner, reflecting the mood of the entire room. The red-dial telephone is picked up, and calls begin.

Within minutes, Youth Congress workers have materialised outside 2 Beltala Road: INC flags, party paraphernalia, the particular atmospheric charge of imminent arrival. They jostle outside the red fortress-like facade of the house that political and legal circles simply called “Beltala”.

Some were admitted into its sprawling lawn, others pressed against the wrought iron gates in the hope that a moment of eye contact or an exchange with Beltala’s resident might foster a brighter future within the Congress fold.

‘Manu Da’ or Siddhartha Shankar Ray was the last Congress Chief Minister of West Bengal, and by any honest reckoning, one of the two or three politicians of genuine national consequence this state has produced.

For decades, the Bhabanipur constituency was synonymous with Siddhartha Shankar Ray, and as a Congress bastion. Its bulwark was a red house in ‘Beltala’.

“The Congress is in my blood,” he once declared—and that, as it turned out, was not mere rhetoric but historical fact.

In 1884, two of his forebears, great-grandfather Durga Mohan Das and great-grand uncle Bhuban Mohan Das, Calcutta barristers, Brahmo reformers, were founding signatories of the Indian National Congress.

Bhuban Mohan’s son and Ray’s grandfather was none other than Chittaranjan Das or........

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