Two years ago, addressing her party workers at an event in Calcutta, Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee had asked the delegates from Birbhum to stand up.

From the dais, her message to the party workers from the district made famous by Rabindranath Tagore was simple yet stern.

“As long as Keshto does not come back home, we will have to fight with thrice the usual intensity. Keshto has to be brought back from prison like a braveheart,” Mamata insisted to the party workers.

The Keshto she referred to is Anubrata Mondal, who was released from Tihar jail on Monday night after spending a little over two years at the high security prison in the national capital. His daughter, Sukanya, too was granted bail recently in the same multi-crore cattle-smuggling case.

On the same day, Mamata was in Bolpur to attend an administrative meeting.

A month before that event at the Netaji Indoor Stadium two years ago, Mondal was arrested by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) taken jail to Asansol and later moved to Tihar, which remained his home for more than two years.

Apart from three cattle-smugglers and Mondal’s daughter, his accountant and his personal driver too were arrested.

Mondal was not the first Trinamul leader to be arrested by the central agencies the CBI and the Enforcement Directorate. A month before Mondal, Bengal’s ruling party’s former secretary-general and minister Partha Chatterjee was arrested in a teachers’ recruitment scam and a booty of Rs. 21.9 crore was recovered from a close female aide of his. Chatterjee has since been booted out of the party and the cabinet.

A year later another Bengal minister, Jyotipriya Mallick, was arrested in the food scam. Early this year, another Trinamul strongman Sheikh Shahjahan was arrested after more than a month of playing hide-and-seek with the central sleuths.

Mallick was removed from the cabinet, though he remains in the party. Shahjahan was suspended from the party.

In these two years, Anubrata Mondal aka Keshto continued to receive the blessings of his party chief, who had once famously said about him “or mathay kom oxygen jaaye” [His brain receives less supply of oxygen] at another party event in Burdwan.

Mondal remained the head of the Trinamul’s Birbhum district unit all this while. For the day-to-day running of the party, Mamata had formed a core committee. In January this year, Mamata dropped three members from the committee, including two sitting MPs Satabdi Roy and Asit Mal, both beneficiaries of Mondal’s organisational prowess. The third was Birbhum’s zilla parishad chairman and a long-standing rival of his, Kajal Sheikh.

“Didi had made it clear in that meeting Keshto will take charge of the organisation as soon as he is released from prison,” said a south Calcutta-based Trinamul leader. “She was confident that he would be granted bail soon.”

That was in January. When the Lok Sabha polls were held this summer, Mondal was still counting his days behind bars.

Once a fish-monger, a resident of Bolpur’s Nichu Patty, Mondal was a relatively unknown face till the Trinamul came to power in 2011. With the blessings of Mamata Banerjee and holding the hidden reins of the administration and police, Mondal till his arrest two years ago had become the last word in the district also associated with the former President Pranab Mukherjee and writer Tarasankar Bandyopadhyay.

Before 2011, there is no evidence of Mondal’s organisational genius. And neither before 2011 nor after has he expressed any desire to hold any post other than the organisational responsibilities given to him by Mamata. He loves to play kingmaker in his own turf. He knows that without Mamata’s blessings he will have no play at all.

In her 13 years in power, Mamata has built around her a ring of strongmen. These strongmen bring to the table electoral results and if the accusations against the Mondals and the Shahjahans can be proved by the central agencies, then they delivered more than just electoral gains.

During the years when the CPM was in power, it had its strongmen too: The likes of Sukur Ali and Tapan Dutta in Midnapore, Majid Master in a part of North 24 Parganas and the late five-time MP from Arambagh Anil Basu, who was expelled from the CPM for anti-party activities, .

The CPM’s ambivalence in the approach towards the strongmen – some it dealt with an iron hand and others with velvet gloves – is seen reflected in Mamata’s actions too. The difference being the CPM’s structural framework kept a kind of check on these strongmen, whereas under Mamata the likes of Anubrata Mondal turned into the law unto themselves.

As the Trinamul’s grip tightened around Bengal in these 13 years, Mondal’s voice grew louder and belligerent.

The “threat culture” of Bengal – that everyone from the junior doctors in government hospitals to Bengali movie industry professionals has been talking about in the aftermath of the RG Kar Medical College rape-murder – can be traced back to Mondal.

In front of cops, Mondal could threaten to “break the limbs”, “gouge the eyes out” and burn the homes of Opposition members. In the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, he had offered “gur-batasa” [jaggery and a sweet] to the central poll panel officials.

Mondal had the audacity to take on one of the greatest poets of Bengal, the late Shankha Ghosh, who had criticised the strongarm tactics of the Trinamul cadres like Anubrata Mondal.

In 2018, three years before his death, Ghosh wrote a poem in a magazine referring to the allegations of widespread political violence in the run-up to that year’s rural-body polls in Bengal. An angry Mondal had questioned the credentials of Ghosh and asked: “This poet is speaking a lot. Who is this poet? We know the poet Rabindranath, Nazrul. Who is this new poet who is speaking against my model of development?”

In Mondal’s model of development, the Opposition parties were not allowed to file nominations in 41 of the 42 zilla parishad seats. The sole opposition nominee who could file the nomination later withdrew.

Such was the threat perception of Mondal that in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls and the 2021 Assembly polls, the Election Commission had ordered him to stay indoors. The move had little impact on the electoral outcome.

The 2024 Lok Sabha polls were held with Mondal behind bars. Trinamul not only retained both the seats in Birbhum, it beat the BJP conclusively. Hence, the logical question arises whether Mamata actually needs these strongmen any longer. Election after election, the Bengal electorate has put their faith firmly in her – not the strongmen.

Some Trinamul insiders, however, say that Mondal’s men continued his work.

“There were people managing the booths [in the Lok Sabha polls] and they did their job exceedingly well. Some of them are loyal to Keshto da,” said a Trinamul leader.

On his return home, Mondal refused to meet the state correctional homes minister and Bolpur MLA Chandranath Sinha, who was once close to him.

Trinamul’s politics is distributed adversarial scenario. It cannot afford to antagonise leaders like Mondal for the fear that he might cross to the other side and cause damage,” said Subhamoy Maitra, political analyst.

“For a party with organization, like the CPM, there were members in different committees who could speak out inside the party in such a situation. Trinamul is entirely dependent on Mamata Banerjee and as long as her popularity remains above the combined negative impact of such local leaders, she should have nothing to fear.”