A giant portrait of Ratan Tata led the immersion procession of the Kali idol of a club in Raiganj run by a local Trinamool leader late on Monday evening.

Rantu Das, the North Dinajpur district president of the Trinamool Chhatra Parishad, who runs Boys’ Sukanta, a club in the town’s Milanpara, claimed that they decided to pay homage to Tata, who died on October 9.

“Ratan Tata was a visionary and people across the country love and admire him. That is why we thought of paying our respect to him through the procession,” said Das, who is known to be close to Trinamool MLA Krishna Kalyani.

As the procession moved, people were surprised to see the garlanded portrait of Tata with the message “Shraddhanjali Nibedaney (with our homage)”.

Along with Das and other members of the club, MLA Kalyani and local party leaders Sandip Biswas and Arindam Sarkar joined the procession.

Trinamool supremo Mamata Banerjee’s farmland agitation in Hooghly’s Singur during the former Left rule had prompted Tata to abandon his Nano factory plans there in 2008 and leave.

Kalyani, when asked about the plan to pay tribute to Tata in such a manner, said: “It would be wrong to perceive that those associated with Trinamool were against Ratan Tata. He
could not set up the car plant in Singur because of the faulty policies of the erstwhile Left Front government.”

He added: “Our chief minister (Mamata Banerjee) had a good relationship with him and we thought of paying tribute to him. He was a personality we all feel proud of.”

The district BJP leadership scoffed at TMC over the tribute.

“It was Trinamool that had forced Ratan Tata to leave Singur and none other than Mamata Banerjee was responsible for it. Now they are resorting to such acts of atonement. But such acts will not work as people across the state and India know well that Trinamool is against industrialisation,” said Basudeb Sarkar, the BJP president of North Dinajpur.