Ambika Banerjee

June 2: A dropped middle name may or may not have helped Ambika Banerjee win the election but it almost robbed him of his gender today.

“Ms Ambika Banerjee,” called out P.D.T. Achary, the Lok Sabha secretary-general, in the House while new MPs were being sworn in.

Out of the aisle stepped a bespectacled octogenarian, nothing in his appearance to suggest that he is not a mister.

“Is he Ambika…?” an incredulous Achary asked an aide who confirmed that the gentleman was indeed the Trinamul Congress’s Howrah MP.

Apparently, a printer’s error on the list of MPs caused the confusion but Achary, who hails from Kerala where two Ambikas were leading ladies in different eras, can be forgiven for thinking that the MP was a woman.

Not to mention the more familiar Ambika — Ambika Soni, the minister.

The confusion could have been avoided had the 81-year-old Trinamul MP retained the full name — Ambika Prasad Banerjee — by which he was known till 1999. After the Lok Sabha poll defeat that year, he dropped the “Prasad” but it is not clear if the omission had anything to do with the result.

Family members said Ba-nerjee’s paternal uncle Lalit Mohan Bandopadhyay had christened him Ambika Prasad. “But my brother-in-law dropped Prasad from his name after he lost the elections,” said Indrani, wife of Banerjee’s younger brother.

Even Mamata Banerjee is said to have requested the MP to change his name when she met party MPs after their swearing-in. “Ambikada, you better change your name,” she was quoted as saying.

Not that anything is wrong with Ambika, which means “mother”or “mother dear”.

But an addition — like Prasad or Nath — makes gender identification easier. The word Ambikanath (husband of Ambika) refers to Shiva in the Samsad dictionary.

In the Markandeya Purana, Kali emerges from Ambika’s brow. The Yajur Veda identifies Ambika as Rudra’s sister. In the Mahabharat, Ambika was the mother of Dhritarashtra.

The Ambika in question —the Trinamul MP — was a Congress MLA from Central Howrah in the early 1970s. He joined Trinamul ahead of the 2006 Assembly polls but lost to the CPM in the Howrah seat.