A gun salute being accorded to Trinamul veteran and minister Subrata Mukherjee at Keoratala crematorium on Friday in the presence of the party’s national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee, and party colleagues Madan Mitra, Firhad Hakim, Saugata Roy, Derek O’Brien, Aroop Biswas, among others.
Mukherjee, 75, had succumbed to his cardiac ailment on Thursday night, ending five decades of public life.
His last journey began from Peace World in Topsia. At 10am, the cortege reached Rabindra Sadan, where it remained for four hours with hundreds across party lines paying tribute to Mukherjee. Many from the BJP hailed him as an able chief minister that Bengal never had. Left leaders, his ideological foes with whom he shared cordial ties, lauded him as a stalwart.
Many from the Congress and Trinamul remembered him fondly as someone with the heart of a child, who loved sweets and was afraid of ghosts.
At 2.15pm, the cortege reached the Vidhan Sabha, and around half-an-hour later, his Ekdalia residence in Ballygunge. At 3.30pm, the hearse started its journey, accompanied by thousands on foot, to Keoratala.
From around 4.45pm, at Keoratala, he was given a gun salute by a police contingent, part of his funeral with full state honours. Mukherjee’s last rites began around 5.15pm.
Chief minister Mamata Banerjee had said on Thursday that she would not be able to see his lifeless body and would not be present at Friday’s funeral. In Mukherjee’s ancestral village Napara in East Burdwan district, his lifelong friend Samsul Islam remembered “Subrata who loved joramonda (a traditional sweet) since his school days”.