Municipal affairs minister Firhad Hakim told councillors of the Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation on Sunday that mayor Sabyasachi Dutta would be removed from his post for his “anti-party” activities, councillors who attended the meeting at Trinamul Bhavan said.
Till Dutta is formally removed, deputy mayor Tapas Chatterjee will be in charge of the daily activities of the civic body.
Dutta, however, told Metro that he had not received any formal communication from Trinamul about his removal from the mayor’s post. “I have not received any official communication from the party. Nobody from the party called me or informed me about any such step,” Dutta said.
Trinamul-turned-BJP leader Mukul Roy met Dutta late on Sunday at the Bidhannagar Swimming Association in Salt Lake’s CF block.
Both said they had a courtesy meeting.
“I consider Dutta my younger brother. I have come to visit him because I wanted to advise him. We did not discuss anything about his joining the BJP,” Roy said, before launching a tirade against his former party.
The civic body has 41 councillors, of whom 38 are from Trinamul. Deputy mayor Chatterjee, Krishna Chakraborty, Devashis Jana, Subhas Bose and Anita Mondal were among the 35-odd councillors who turned up at the Trinamul Bhavan meeting.
Bidhannagar MLA Sujit Bose was present, too.
Almost all the councillors who attended the closed-door meeting told Hakim that Dutta was not following Trinamul’s policies and his conduct as mayor was “flawed and biased”, a councillor said.
“We told Hakim that all of us have lost faith in Sabyasachi Dutta. It is becoming impossible for us to work and provide civic services to the residents with him at the helm. We also told Hakim that we would resign if Dutta remained mayor,” said the councillor, who did not want to be named.
Sudhir Saha, one of the councillors at the meeting, said they had had enough of Dutta’s high-handedness. “He was never fit to be mayor,” Saha said.
This was not the first time Dutta was snubbed by councillors of the Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation.
A majority of the councillors had stayed away from a meeting called by Dutta on June 11. Many of those councillors later claimed that the no-show was an act of rebellion against the mayor.
The abstention brought to the fore the infighting in Trinamul in Salt Lake and its adjoining areas. One of the factions of the party in those areas is led by Dutta and the other by deputy mayor Chatterjee, a former CPM leader and chairman of the erstwhile Rajarhat Municipality.
Dutta, who is also the Rajarhat-New Town MLA, had rubbed his party the wrong way on Friday by participating in an agitation against the Mamata Banerjee government and daring the organisation to act against him. The agitation was organised by a Trinamul-backed labour union in the state-run power sector in Salt Lake.
In his speech at the protest venue, Dutta had condemned the government for not accepting the longstanding demand for a raise in salaries and payment of the pending dearness allowance.
He had taken a dig at state power minister Sobhandeb Chattopadhyay, saying: “The department is called power. But the minister has no power.”
Challenging the Trinamul leadership, he had said: “If I am saying anti-party things, take action against me. I have no objection.”
Minister Hakim, who is also mayor of Calcutta and general secretary of Trinamul, said after the meeting on Sunday: “I have come to attend the meeting as a party observer. I will submit my report to party supremo Mamata Banerjee, who will take a call. No one is above the party discipline. The matter will also be taken up by the disciplinary committee of the party.”
BJP leader Roy said while speaking to reporters at a party programme that only two councillors were dissatisfied with Dutta as mayor.
“People of Bidhannagar are satisfied with his good work. They are not satisfied with their MLA (Sujit Bose) and that was reflected in the Lok Sabha poll results. The BJP benefited from the role Sabyasachi played during the Lok Sabha polls.”
Roy added: “Let Trinamul sack him as mayor. It won’t be easy because mayor is elected and not nominated.”
Officials at Nabanna said a “no-confidence” motion would have to be passed by the civic house to remove Dutta as mayor. Sources at the Bidhannagar civic body said the deputy mayor was expected to meet the mayoral council members to discuss the no-confidence motion.
Ahead of the Lok Sabha polls, Dutta had drawn flak from the Trinamul leadership after Roy met him at his residence.