Somen Mitra, West Bengal Congress president, dies

KOLKATA: West Bengal Pradesh Congress president Somen Mitra, popularly called “Chhorda”, died at a private city hospital late on Wednesday. He was 78. Mitra had been suffering from heart ailments for quite a few years and was hospitalised two weeks ago with kidney-related complications.
Mitra rose from the alleys of Amherst Street in north Kolkata and cut his teeth in Congress politics during the tumultuous late Sixties when most youth activists took a Left turn.He was among the handful who sided with controversial Congress leader Sanjay Gandhi and held the party flag aloft in Kolkata even when some party seniors were busy distancing from Indira Gandhi’s Congress(I) after Emergency.
Mitra silently kept building bridges with local youth and formed a brigade strong enough to take on Left in central Kolkata. In his later days, the master organizer and poll strategist became the key person in clinching an electoral understanding with Left in the 2016 assembly polls.
Unlike Mamata Banerjee, Mitra was never a mass leader. He was not known for his eloquence either, in assembly or in Parliament. Yet, Congress workers would look up to him in any crisis because he was their mentor. Like Banerjee, Mitra served as Youth Congress president from 1978 to 1986, and later beat her in the race for Pradesh Congress president in 1992, prompting Banerjee to float Trinamool Congress six years later in 1998. Mitra gave up the Pradesh Congress president’s post on his own in 1998.
Otherwise a loyal Congress soldier, a cornered Mitra, after 1998, showed his pull to AICC bosses when he engineered a cross-voting in the Bengal Assembly during the 2000 Rajya Sabha polls in which TMC-backed Independent candidate Jayanta Bhattacharya defeated Congress candidate Debaprasad Roy.
Mitra’s critics often accuse him of precipitating the split in Congress that ultimately pushed it to the margins in Bengal and gave the Left a three-decade uninterrupted innings. They argue that the seven-time MLA from the now-non-existent Sealdah assembly constituency could not have made it to the legislature without an “informal handholding” with the Left.
Mitra made amends to his stand and quit Congress in 2008 and floated his own party, the Pragatishil Indira Congress that later merged with Trinamool in 2009 to give the final push to the Left Front in the 2011 assembly polls. Banerjee and Mitra sharing the dais was a rare photo-frame in Bengal politics after 1992. Mitra won from Diamond Harbour Lok Sabha constituency on a TMC ticket in 2009.
But “Chhorda” in Trinamool was like a fish out of water hastening the inevitable — Mitra’s homecoming in 2014. He took over as Pradesh Congress president once again in 2018 after Adhir Chowdhury and pursued a Left-of-Centre politics till his last, giving shape to a secular alternative to BJP and Trinamool.