Mukul Roy, backbencher

The seating changes mean Roy, who sat on the frontrow, will now have as his neighbour suspended and incarcerated party MP Kunal Ghosh. (Source: Express Photo by Subham Dutta)

The day after her meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi did not go her way, Mamata Banerjee shifted the spotlight from the financial worries of the state to the internal turmoil in her party. The Trinamool Congress has announced it is shifting its former general secretary and leader of the party to the backbench in the Rajya Sabha, besides preparing a dossier of all his anti-party statements.

“The party has decided to alter seating arrangements in the Rajya Sabha. The four seats we have in the last row will now be occupied by Vivek Gupta, Dola Sen (due to be elected in place of Srinjoy Roy), Kunal Ghose and Mukul Roy,” Trinamool spokesman Derek O’Brien said Tuesday. “This is the decision taken by the party, I am communicating it. I have also been asked to put together a dossier for the disciplinary committee of all statements made by Mukul Roy in the media that go against the party line.”

The seating changes mean Roy, who sat on the frontrow, will now have as his neighbour suspended and incarcerated party MP Kunal Ghosh. Roy, who arrived in Delhi Tuesday morning, responded to the decision with a nonchalant “they haven’t thrown me out of Parliament, have they?”

In the days of his estrangement with the party he once helped build, Roy has met a number of people in the government including Modi and Arun Jaitley. “Today I went and asked Jaitleyji about his wife’s health,” Roy says. “Thatis not something to tomtom, is it?”

MoS for Coal and Power Piyush Goyal, meanwhile, visited Mamata though both sides were silent about what they discussed. Sources say Goyal came to discuss passage of bills.

The “who blinks first” game between Mamata and Roy, meanwhile, is turning ugly with sources close to the CM alleging Roy had tried to scuttle the party’s bid to retain his flat at 181 South Avenue for a Delhi office, that he leaked the CBI’s letter to the party on funding to embarrass Mamata while in Delhi. Roy denies anything of that sort.

“I have written to the UD Ministry expressing my willingness to surrender 181 and have not gone back on it,” he said. “Anybody who is talking about my having faxed my desire to retain the flat as an afterthought probably does not want Trinamool to have that flat.”

Sources say when the party tried to apply for the flat, the functionary who went to submit the application was told Roy had gone back on his letter of Friday and had asked for retaining the flat.

Roy’s 181 South Avenue had for long time functioned as the party office in Delhi. It was also the address where Mamata live when in the capital. This time, in yet another indication of the changing dynamics, Mamata is staying at an adjacent flat at 183 South Avenue, allotted in the name of her nephew Abhishek, a first-time MP and widely believed to be the reason for Roy’s rapid sidelining within the party though the immediate falling out is perceived to have happened over the CBI summons to Roy on the Saradha scam. In a role also reminiscent of Mukul’s on Tuesday when Goyal came visiting, it was Abhishek who was waiting for him outside the gate and ushered him in.

Source:: Indian Express