Trinamul’s de facto number 2 Abhishek Banerjee on Wednesday evening paid a visit to a private hospital off the EM Bypass, to check on the health of party turncoat Mukul Roy’s wife Krishna, who has Covid-19.

The development is deemed significant as Roy, formerly Trinamul’s number 2, is now a national vice-president of the BJP. Roy left Trinamul in 2017, largely on account of testy ties with Abhishek, Trinamul supremo Mamata Banerjee’s nephew and political heir-apparent.

Abhishek’s gesture prompted a visit hours later, in a first since Krishna fell so ill, from the BJP’s state unit chief Dilip Ghosh.

Diamond Harbour MP Abhishek and Roy did not come face to face on Wednesday evening. Nor could he meet Krishna. But he spoke to their son Subhranshu at the hospital.

“Krishnadi tested positive, along with Mukulda, over two weeks ago. But she was hospitalised with complications and is deemed critical, on ventilation …. That’s why Abhishek paid a visit. Officially a courtesy visit, it has political significance,” said a Trinamul MP.

“Clearly, she (Mamata) encouraged Abhishek to do this. But had Abhishek not been willing and had Prashant Kishor not recommended it, he would not have gone,” he added.

On Ghosh’s visit, the Trinamul MP said: “This is absurdly tragicomic....The BJP is now going to go all out to retain the Roys.”

Subhranshu, Trinamul’s former Bijpur MLA, followed his father to the BJP and lost from the same seat this time. His recent post on social media, which did not name any party but advised introspection instead of criticism of a state government elected by the people, caused a stir.

Roy won the first election of his life from Krishnagar North, as one of the BJP’s 77 MLAs.

Asked if frosty ties between Roy and Abhishek would thaw, a Trinamul vice-president said there were no permanent friends or enemies in politics. “A lot of this is being engineered by Subhranshu, who has a long political career ahead of him. It certainly isn’t unreciprocated, as this evening showed,” he said.

Roy, whom Mamata had repeatedly spoken fondly of in her otherwise all-out aggressive campaign against the BJP, has been conspicuously “disinterested” in the party’s activities for a while.

Sources in the BJP state unit have said that in the 2018 panchayat and 2019 Lok Sabha polls, Roy had been placed at the helm of the election committee of BJP. In both the elections, he had enabled unprecedented successes for the party. In 2021, the central leadership spearheaded by Amit Shah commandeered the state unit, and Roy was left with little to do. His diminished role, despite his reputation as a master strategist with the ability to deliver electoral triumphs, upset him.

A state unit functionary of the BJP said that Roy had been issuing warnings, identifying crucial inflection points for months before the elections, but his advice went unheeded.

“For instance, he had advised against banking so heavily on polarisation in the campaign, he had been saying it would not produce the desired results in a state like Bengal. Now we know he was correct, but nobody paid heed to him then,” said the source. After the results, Roy has largely been silent on the BJP’s electoral debacle in Bengal.