Mukul Roy, Trinamool co-founder and Mamata Banerjee’s one-time “number two” who surprisingly switched to the BJP before returning to the fold, died on Monday at a private hospital in Calcutta following long illness. He was 71.

While the shifts in loyalty and the Saradha and Narada controversies cast a shadow over his long political career, Mukul’s enduring popularity across party lines was evident from the tributes that poured in after his passing.

Among those expressing grief were Mamata, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge and Bengal leader of the Opposition Suvendu Adhikari.

While Mamata’s leadership and charisma were the undoubted drivers of Trinamool’s rise to power in 2011 in what was deemed an impenetrable Red citadel, Mukul’s organisational nous and tactical acumen played a key role, earning him the somewhat clichéd moniker of “Chanakya”.

“He was the man who silently cracked the CPM’s organisation and made many of them work discreetly for Trinamool. In many places, Left Front leaders could not fathom his strategy before they had lost power,” a Trinamool insider said.

TMC MP Abhishek Banerjee pays homage to the mortal remains of BJP leader Mukul Roy, in Kolkata, Monday, Feb. 23, 2026

After his shock departure to the BJP in 2017, Mukul used his political management skills to help lift the party to 18 seats out of 42 in Bengal in the 2019 general election, creating a buzz about a saffron sweep in the 2021 Assembly polls.

But that proved a bridge too far and, after Mamata handed the BJP a drubbing, Mukul returned to what the Bengal chief minister described without a trace of rancour as his “home”.

“His contributions to Bengal’s politics and his organisational acumen are unforgettable. Regardless of party affiliations, political circles will feel his absence,” Mamata wrote on X on Monday.

Mukul, who rose to become junior Union minister for shipping (2009) and railways (2012) when Trinamool was part of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance, was born in Kanchrapara in 1954 and began his political journey in the 1970s as a Left worker.

But his showed his peripatetic instincts very early, joining the Congress and emerging as a close aide to then party strongman Somen Mitra.

In the early 1990s, he came in touch with Mamata — Somen’s rival in the party — and became an integral part of her political programmes. When Mamata formed Trinamool in 1998, she appointed Mukul as founding national general secretary.

After the triumph of the 2011 election, Mukul played a lead role in consolidating the gains by engineering defections from the Left.

Even after he was elected to the Rajya Sabha and inducted into the Union ministry, Mukul continued with his hands-on style of organisational work that had made him a familiar face to the party’s rank and file from Calcutta to Darjeeling.

“He travelled extensively across the districts to plant saplings for Trinamool that have today become trees. He would reach every corner of Bengal as Mamata’s representative whenever any party worker was killed in political violence,” a party insider said.

Mamata, in her condolence message in Bengali, wrote: “He was my long-time political colleague and companion in many political struggles. The news of his departure has left me heartbroken.”

Abhishek Banerjee, the party’s current national general secretary, accompanied Mukul’s last journey from the Assembly to his ancestral home in Kanchrapara and then to the site of cremation.

It was after the 2016 election that, party sources said, the distance between Mukul and Mamata grew because of issues of political succession.

Mukul, his ambitions frustrated, joined the BJP in November 2017, shortly after Trinamool had preemptively suspended him for six years.

Some in Trinamool, however, argue that Mukul made the switch to shield himself from allegations relating to the Saradha deposit-mobilisation and Narada cash-on-camera scams that had brought Bengal politics to boiling point.

Mukul, with his deep understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of both the CPM and Trinamool, is widely held to be the architect of his new party’s brilliant electoral showing from Bengal in 2019. The official credit, though, went to then state BJP president Dilip Ghosh.

Before the 2021 Assembly polls, several Trinamool leaders joined the BJP, many of them considered close to Mukul, apparently expecting a change of guard in Bengal.

When Mukul, who won on a BJP ticket from Krishnanagar Uttar in Nadia, returned to the party in Mamata’s presence shortly after the polls, she referred to him as “ghorer chhele (our own)”.

Official records in the Assembly, though, continued to list Mukul as a BJP legislator, triggering controversy over his political identity.

Last year, his membership became the subject of legal scrutiny before Calcutta High Court, and ended up in the Supreme Court.

All these chapters of controversy may now be closed with his death.

The record books will show that Mukul Roy passed away as a BJP lawmaker. But the man, in the end, will be remembered the way he deserves to be — as a beloved member of the Trinamool family.