Former minister and city mayor Sovan Chatterjee, once deemed among the tallest leaders in Mamata Banerjee's party, returned to it on Monday after a gap of seven years.
Chatterjee, 61, had left the Trinamool Congress in 2018 for a brief, unremarkable stint in the BJP, which followed a protracted period of political oblivion, mostly for contentious choices he made in his personal life.
Monday's event was no surprise, as he had been rehabilitated in the ruling dispensation on October 17 as the chairperson of the New Town Kolkata Development Authority (NKDA), two days after meeting the chief minister during her north Bengal trip.
After rejoining Trinamool with his "close associate" Baisakhi Bandyopadhyay on Monday in an event overseen by the party's state president Subrata Bakshi and senior minister Aroop Biswas, Chatterjee went with her to the party's Number Two — Mamata's nephew and heir-apparent — Abhishek Banerjee, who purportedly made the comeback possible.
"This is a return to my roots... my blood vessels, my nervous system. Didi (Mamata) is my family. Trinamool flows through my veins. This is my home. I will give it everything, working under her leadership again to strengthen the party further," said Chatterjee.
Biswas, who now holds the housing portfolio that Chatterjee once held in the Mamata-led cabinet, said it was a homecoming for the old boy.
"Everybody (raised in Trinamool) has to return to Didi's shelter, sooner or later," said the minister.
Chatterjee, who cut his teeth in politics with the Congress since 1985, quit Trinamool after 20 years since the party's 1998 inception, and joined the BJP along with Baisakhi in 2019. They left the saffron camp after "irreconcilable differences" before the 2021 Assembly election after it became clear that neither Chatterjee nor Baisakhi was being fielded for the polls by their new party.
The meeting with Abhishek, whose testy ties with Chatterjee as well as current city mayor Firhad Hakim were once among the ruling camp's worst-kept secrets, took place in the wake of September's pre-Puja deluge in Calcutta that claimed around a dozen lives from electrocution and wrecked vast swathes of the metropolis for days. The capabilities of mayor Hakim, also the state's urban development and municipal affairs minister, were questioned amid widespread public outrage.
"They (Chatterjee and Baisakhi) joined to work as soldiers of the party, to strengthen it. My best wishes," said Abhishek after meeting the duo.
Some in Trinamool wish to see Chatterjee's rehabilitation as an alarm bell for Hakim. However, others pointed out that besides being the tallest minority leader in the party, 66-year-old Hakim is still almost blindly trusted by Mamata in her old guard.
"For now, think of this (Chatterjee's return) as the return of an efficient organiser, an ace at fundraising, and an able election-manager with considerable abilities to make a difference at least in Calcutta and its immediate neighbourhood," said a senior in the leadership, underscoring the shocker in the Lok Sabha election details last year, where the BJP secured leads from 45 from the city’s 144 wards, a 15-fold rise from the three wards the saffron camp won in the 2021 civic polls.
Chatterjee's estranged wife Ratna, whose side Mamata took when things turned sour is now the Trinamool MLA from his former Assembly seat, Behala Purba, and the councillor from his former Kolkata Municipal Corporation ward, 131.
The buzz in Trinamool is that Chatterjee might be fielded from former minister Partha Chatterjee's Behala Paschim seat.