KolkataNovember 17, 2025 12:11 PM IST
First published on: Nov 17, 2025 at 12:11 PM IST
Once seen as a key strategist of the Trinamool Congress (TMC) and even dubbed as the “Chanakya of Bengal politics,” Mukul Roy now finds himself disqualified as an MLA. Roy has been ailing and bedridden in a private hospital in Kolkata for the last one-and-a-half years.
In a ruling last Thursday, the Calcutta High Court disqualified Roy as a member of the West Bengal Assembly under the anti-defection law. He had won from the Krishnanagar Uttar Assembly seat in Nadia district in the 2021 Bengal Assembly polls on the BJP’s ticket, but returned to the TMC soon afterwards.
The Bench of Justice Debangsu Basak and Justice Md Shabbar Rashidi overturned the Speaker’s earlier decision upholding Roy’s membership of the House.
Roy’s return to the TMC in June 2021 triggered a legal challenge from Leader of the Opposition Suvendu Adhikari and BJP MLA Ambika Roy, who first questioned his appointment as chairperson of the Public Accounts Committee — a post traditionally reserved for the Opposition — before moving the high court.
The Speaker’s insistence that Roy was “officially” still a BJP MLA highlighted the “institutional ambiguity” that often surrounds defection cases in the state Assemblies.
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“My father has been bed-ridden. He does not give any response. So we didn’t try to intimate him about the high court order,” Roy’s son Shubhrangshu Roy told The Indian Express.
Once considered indispensable to Bengal’s shifting political alignments, Roy has been absent from public life for a long time now, with his protracted hospitalisation rendering him into just a symbolic figure rather than an active actor in Bengal politics.
A founding member of the TMC, Roy helped party chief Mamata Banerjee establish her organisation. Rising through its ranks, he became general secretary and a Rajya Sabha MP. He also became a minister in the UPA 2 government, handling the Shipping and Railways portfolios. He was seen to have played a significant role in leveraging political networks and ensuring inductions into the TMC that reshaped Bengal’s political sphere after 2011.
Following the TMC’s victory over the Left Front in 2011, Roy was at the forefront of “engineering” large-scale defections from the CPI(M) and Congress to the TMC fold, with councillors, MLAs, and zilla parishad members switching allegiances in coordinated waves.
Between 2016 and 2021, defections had become institutionalised with nearly 20 of Congress’s 44 MLAs and eight of the Left’s 32 joining either the TMC or the BJP.
However, Roy himself defected to the BJP in 2017, which marked a pivotal moment for the party’s expansion in the state. He helped the BJP construct an organisational presence where it traditionally had none, contributing to its tally of 18 Lok Sabha seats in 2019 and facilitating the induction of several TMC heavyweights, including Suvendu Adhikari, into the party.
Yet his return to the TMC immediately after the BJP’s failed bid to oust Mamata Banerjee in the 2021 polls exposed the volatility of his political innings. A senior TMC leader said: “His name was once taken just after Mamata Banerjee in Bengal politics. He was so important and influential. Now he is lying on a bed and nobody goes to see him except his family.”