The Mamata Banerjee government’s response to the RG Kar agitation has triggered anger far beyond the rape and murder of a junior doctor in Trinamul MP Jawhar Sircar; he offered to quit the Rajya Sabha and politics on Sunday in anguish against the endemic culture of “corruption” in Bengal’s ruling dispensation.

The term of 72-year-old Sircar, a former IAS officer and an articulate speaker who has never pulled punches while taking on the Narendra Modi regime inside and outside Parliament, ends in 2026.

Sircar told The Telegraph hours after he sent his two-page offer of resignation to Trinamool chairperson Mamata that his aim was to give a much-needed wake-up call to the supreme leadership for a course correction after the “clumsy” handling of the RG Kar protests. He had joined Trinamool in July 2021.

“My entire intention is to commit political suicide, to conduct political self-immolation, so that people wake up…. Do what I have asked of you (Mamata), don’t take me for an enemy,” he said.

“I am quitting as MP primarily because of WB government’s faulty handling of the most spontaneous public movement following the terrible rape-murder case at RG Kar Hospital. Quitting politics — to be with the people in their struggle for justice. My commitment to values unchanged,” Sircar posted on X where he shared his letter to Mamata.

In the letter, Sircar raised concerns over the state’s alleged mishandling of the protests seeking justice for the raped and murdered RG Kar doctor. He underscored various issues he confronted during his stint in the party, particularly his distaste for the “corruption” in the ruling dispensation, and expressed gratitude for the Upper House stint.

“...West Bengal is unable to accept this extravagant corruption and domination.... I just cannot accept some things, like corrupt officers (or doctors) getting prime and top postings. No,” Sircar wrote.

“In all my years, I have not seen such angst and total no-confidence against the government, even when it says something correct or factual. I have suffered patiently for a month since the terrible incident at RG Kar Hospital, and was hoping for your direct intervention with the agitating junior doctors, in the old style of Mamata Banerjee. It has not happened...,” he added.

Sircar later told this newspaper: “You (Mamata) have to go to the vortex of the problem, and that is RG Kar. Talk it out with them (protesting doctors). Then if that fails, let the people decide what to do…. Now, after a month, they will listen to none other. She has to reach out, in the old style of Mamata Banerjee, jumping into the problem.”

Trinamool sources said Mamata had called up Sircar and tried to dissuade him from resigning.

Although Sircar did not wish to divulge details of the conversation, a senior leader said the chief minister had spoken to him at length.

“She tried her best to dissuade him, said this is not the right time to go, and that we have been doing our best, and so on…. He remained firm. The conversation was inconclusive. She couldn’t change his mind,” said the source, underscoring that Sircar and Mamata have shared a “bond akin to siblings” for decades. “However, none in the leadership is losing sleep on the political or electoral impact of his departure, as there will be none,” the source said.

“He was all but gone in 2022 after raising his voice in public against the graft allegations targeted at the party,” the source added.

Sircar said he wished the leadership “gets more decisive”.

“Didi should take things in her own stride and not take a confrontational attitude… not everything is Ram (saffron) and Bam (Left),” he added.

Sircar said: “Such a non-politically organised, non-stop expression of spontaneous disgust, such an explosion of popular angst. It doesn’t take a septuagenarian to understand that this disgust is not only for Abhaya but also against the government’s attitude towards it,” he told this newspaper.

“If the machinery of order breaks down, if a commissioner of police has to sit across the table with protesters and accept the demand for his own resignation — it must have taken considerable patience on his part — it is symptomatic of a much wider malaise,” he added.

“The administrative response (to RG Kar) has been very clumsy…. Both unresponsiveness and playing down, maybe good administration to them. But it’s bad publicity, and it backfired,” Sircar said, adding that he might meet Rajya Sabha Chairperson Jagdeep Dhankhar on Thursday and tender his resignation as a member.

“I don’t want the cancerous communal forces to take over…. Anybody and everybody else can come (to power), for all I care. This is my principled stand,” said the former Union culture secretary.

The editor of Trinamool’s Bengali mouthpiece Jago Bangla, Sukhendu Sekhar Ray, said: “When a man of his stature feels compelled to write a letter like that, the people get what’s going on.”

Three-term Rajya Sabha member Ray, 75, has been firm in his criticism of the alleged mishandling of the RG Kar fallout. Asked if he too was considering resignation, Ray said: “Not yet. But if and when I take such an extreme decision, you will surely come to know.”

Trinamool’s Kunal Ghosh said many of the points raised by Sircar were things he and others in the leadership agreed on, but they would rather want to stay in the party and see that positive, visible steps are taken in the right direction.

However, Trinamool’s Dum Dum MP Saugata Roy, who had fiercely criticised Sircar during the 2022 public spat, said the likes of him should simply not be fielded. “Such self-centred people have no commitment to the party. No mass connect,” Roy said.

“Whenever some adverse situation emerges, they look for a way out and cause discomfort to the party,” he added.

The BJP’s chief spokesperson for Bengal, Samik Bhattacharya, said although Sircar was “primarily an anti-Modi figure”, his credentials were beyond question and his departure would be a loss for the Rajya Sabha and Indian politics.

“It has come to such a pass for the Trinamool Congress that even their own are compelled to say and do such things,” he said.

The Congress’s Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury and CPM central committee member Sujan Chakraborty lauded Sircar’s decision, but rued the alleged inability of the Trinamool dispensation to take lessons from this.