A diverse choice of tried and tested names – ranging from an RTI activist to a college teaching social worker to a leader from the north Bengal tea belt – form the Trinamul Congress’s band of fresh faces who would join hands with some of the party’s old guns in taking on the Narendra Modi government in the Upper House of the Parliament.
The nature of concoction, of the old hats and new, reveal a marginal shift from Mamata Banerjee’s earlier preferences for socially established personalities like artists, journalists and former bureaucrats to counterbalance hardcore politicians representing the Trinamul in the Rajya Sabha and pinning her hopes this time on those who have already performed and delivered. The shadow of the chief minister’s nephew Abhishek Banerjee behind the final choice of names is nearly hard to miss.
While RTI activist and party spokesperson, Saket Gokhale would be filling up the seat left vacant by former Goa chief minister Luizinho Falerio for a broken term which ends in April 2026, the party has decided to field two fresh faces to replace experienced campaigners Sushmita Dev and Shanta Chhetri. Samirul Islam, a professor of Chemistry at the Dinabandhu Andrews College in Calcutta and president of civil society organization Bangla Sanskriti Mancha would fill up the shoes of Sushmita Dev and Prakash Chik Baraik, the party’s president in Alipurduar district, would be the North Bengal representative replacing Chhetri, a leader from Darjeeling.
Three of the party’s sitting members in the Rajya Sabha – Derek O’Brien, Sukhendu Sekhar Roy and Dola Sen – get another shot at the Upper House following their re-nomination in the July 24 polls for 10 seats from Gujarat, West Bengal and Goa, six of which are from Bengal. Considering the number of MLAs in the Bengal Assembly which the TMC currently has, electing five out of six seats from the state should be a breeze. Replacing Falerio with Gokhale shouldn’t be a problem either. It would, however, have to forfeit one seat from Bengal to the BJP, given the gain in MLAs in the saffron camp in the 2021 state polls.
“I’m extremely grateful to my leaders @MamataOfficial & @abhishekaitc for fielding me as a candidate for election as Member of Parliament, Rajya Sabha. I’m overwhelmed by their faith in me & for giving this opportunity to a young middle-class boy who comes from a non-political background,” Gokhale tweeted following the party’s announcement of the names of its candidates.
The two-year stint in politics of the 36-year-old RTI activist has been eventful, though. Gokhale hogged headlines when he was arrested in December last year by the Gujarat Police over a tweet for posting alleged misinformation about 2022 Morbi bridge collapse. Mamata Banerjee herself vented her exasperation against the Modi administration when Gokhale was re-arrested over the same tweet in a matter of few hours after he was granted bail from a metropolitan court in Ahmedabad. Subsequently, in January 2023, Gokhale was arrested again by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) on charges of money laundering. Before finally securing bail from the Supreme Court in April this year, Gokhale had spent nearly five months in prison.
“My work in the Rajya Sabha is going to be very similar to what I have been doing so far… that is, to ask questions. This gives me a better platform to hold the government accountable. That’s something I intend to leverage to the maximum from this platform where they have to answer, they can’t shy away like they do for RTI applications. I’ll keep doing my research and use them to point out where this government is harming the country. I will hold them accountable on that,” Gokhale told The Telegraph Online.
The young politician made no efforts to hide his enamour for the Trinamul supremo. “With my little experience in life, I have seen the kind of fight that Mamata Banerjee has put up. When you are led by someone like that who has endured so much in her life, then five months in jail is nothing. When a person like that is your inspiration then five months or even five years in jail can’t break you,” Gokhale said.
“In the grander scheme of things, I’m a nobody. So for the BJP to go all out against me, send the ED and put me in prison shows their cowardice and nothing else. I would understand if they went after ministers and MPs, but for them to go after a nobody like me somewhere shows their insecurity,” he added, stating he would use his prison experience to debate the Prison Reforms Bill which is likely to be tabled in the Parliament later this year.
For Samirul Islam, a careful choice from the minority community no doubt, his greenhorn status in partisan politics posed no issues before the Trinamul top brass in picking him up for Rajya Sabha possibly because of his anti-CAA-anti-NRC movements, farmer’s agitation and “No vote to BJP” campaigns in the past. Islam was active during the Covid pandemic among marginalized communities of central Bengal and ran a community kitchen in Birbhum. His sustained work among migrant workers cemented his position among the underprivileged sections, especially among the tribals and Kurmis which the party is desperately trying to woo back.
“The Rajya Sabha nomination serves as an opportunity to take our issue to a much broader platform and play an active role in framing policies,” Islam told The Telegraph Online. “This is a big responsibility on my shoulder and I am obliged to Didi and Abhishek for having faith in me,” he added.
Asked whether he has considered the possibility of a conflict of interest between his party’s stands and policies of his civil organization in future, the teacher said: “I have spoken to all the stakeholders of my organization after I got the offer and I have their blessings for this new role.”
The low profile which Prakash Chik Baraik has managed to retain since he was appointed district president of Alipurduar by Abhishek Banerjee nearly two years ago isn’t his only USP. Baraik, son of a tea garden worker in that district and himself a former member of that fraternity, has successfully managed to allay differences between various factions of the party ever since he took charge. The party’s decision to enhance Baraik’s political weight may have been the result of his acceptance, not just among the cross-section of party workers in his district but also with the TMC national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee.
The drift of the tea garden workers away from the Trinamul to the BJP over the last several years has remained a spot of bother for the party and Baraik’s presence in the Parliament could help the TMC push its tea garden agenda amid the country’s highest policymakers and, by extension, regain the trust of the community whose political loyalty is crucial to winning elections in the Terai and Dooras regions of the state, party leaders felt.
“The choice of new faces is a great balance which our party seeks to achieve. They are all eminent people, qualified for the job and represent all sections of our society,” said Frhad Hakim, senior Trinamul leader.
