Partha Pratim Roy Main Uddin Chisti

Kaka (uncle in Bengali) no longer sounds music to the ears of north Bengal development minister Rabindranath Ghosh.

In an interaction with newspersons here on Sunday, the minister said he would prefer people to address him with any other title but not “uncle”.

“I don’t want anybody to call me kaka. They can call me uncle using other variants like mama and can even call me an elder brother or simply by my name. But not kaka,” Ghosh said at his residence.

Asked about the reason for his distaste for kaka, the minister said: “I will tell it on some other day.”

Close aides to Ghosh, who is also the Cooch Behar district president of the party, said differences between him and Partha Pratim Roy, the Trinamul MP of Cooch Behar, had triggered the remark.

Partha, who was mentored and brought into politics by Ghosh, addresses the minister as kaka.

“In closed quarters, Rabida had on many occasions lamented the differences between him and Partha. He even said how my uttering kaka….kaka repeatedly, Partha derived benefits from him,” said a Trinamul leader close to Ghosh.

A year after Partha became MP, his relationship with Ghosh started souring. The equations reached a nadir after clashes had erupted between supporters of Trinamul and its youth wing frequently.

Partha is the Cooch Behar district youth Trinamul president.

“Recently, Rabida had said in public that if the party fielded Partha as the Lok Sabha candidate in 2019, he would not campaign. It seems he could no longer bear to hear kaka from anybody,” said a party leader.

Partha, when told about Ghosh’s remarks, said: “It all depends on the relation. A father is a father….. an uncle is an uncle…. I don’t want to comment further.”