Once Bengal's master of defections, ailing Mukul Roy loses seat to same law he long outplayed

Kolkata, Nov 13 (PTI) In a twist steeped in political irony, the Calcutta High Court on Thursday disqualified senior TMC leader Mukul Roy as MLA under the anti-defection law, the very statute he once navigated, bent and weaponised at the height of his influence as one of the most formidable political organisers of West Bengal.

The court noted that Roy, elected from Krishnanagar Uttar on a BJP ticket in the 2021 Assembly polls, defected to the TMC on June 11 that year by declaring his return at a press conference. Photographs, videos, press statements and his own admissions were deemed sufficient to establish the switch.

But the verdict comes at a time when the once indomitable strategist, often hailed as the "Chanakya of Bengal politics" in the post-Left Front era, is a shadow of his former self, severely ill, completely absent from politics since 2021 and currently hospitalised.

The contrast between his earlier authority and present frailty lends the judgment a sharp poignancy.

For decades, Roy was West Bengal's most feared and admired backroom operator.

After the TMC swept to power in 2011, Roy, then the party's national general secretary till 2015, oversaw an unprecedented wave of defections from the CPI(M) and Congress.

Left and Congress-held fortresses fell not through ballots but through calculated persuasion. Opposition-controlled Zilla Parishads and municipalities flipped overnight as groups of councillors and MLAs crossed over.

Even the TMC's Rajya Sabha arithmetic in 2014 Rajya Sabha polls in February was bolstered through switches engineered by Roy.

Until 2011, West Bengal prided itself on ideological loyalty. Floor-crossing was dismissed as a political habit of other states; but that changed rapidly with TMC's rise.

Once the Left's 34-year rule ended, a steady procession of Congress and CPI(M) legislators began drifting into the ruling camp, turning defections into an everyday affair.

Roy perfected the art - mass parades of councillors, flag-hoisting ceremonies and orchestrated public displays of numerical dominance at party headquarters.

The former railway minister himself defected to the BJP in 2017, carrying his finely honed playbook with him. Ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha polls and the 2021 Assembly elections, he emerged as the saffron party's key recruiter, tapping into TMC's internal discontent and bringing several of its MLAs and MPs into the BJP fold.

It was a moment of political symmetry, the strategist who once fuelled TMC's expansion through defections helped the BJP chip away at the ruling party using the very methods he had mastered.

"The architect of defections had, in effect, become the architect of counter-defections when Mukul da joined the BJP," said a senior TMC leader who did not wish to be named.

In the 16th West Bengal Assembly (2016-2021) alone, nearly 20 of the Congress's 44 MLAs and eight of the Left's 32 legislators switched sides, mostly to the TMC or the BJP, underlining how defections had become the defining feature of Bengal's post-2011 politics.

The high court termed as "perverse" the Speaker's decision that Roy continued to remain a BJP MLA despite his public return to the TMC.

With the case lingering for four years and the Assembly's term ending in 2026, the Krishnanagar North seat now stands vacant, though a bypoll is unlikely with Assembly elections due in April-May next year.

Speaker Biman Banerjee said he had acted "with due consideration" and would examine the order.

Roy's disqualification comes long after he withdrew from active politics following his worsening health after the 2021 elections.

By 2022, he resigned as chairman of the Public Accounts Committee citing ill health, a rare retreat for a leader who once built and dismantled local bodies without entering the public arena.

Since then, his public appearances dwindled; his frailty deepened. Multiple hospitalisations followed, including the current one.

For a man who once redrew the state's political map through midnight meetings and silent manoeuvres, the judgment marks a full-circle moment, the anti-defection law turning not on the strategist who mastered it, but on an ailing figure far removed from the battlefield he once dominated. PTI PNT NN