Mamata age lie cloud over '84 poll win

If the revelations in her recently published book ‘My Unforgettable Memories’ are to be believed, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee violated the Constitution by contesting the 1984 Lok Sabha election despite being underage.

In the book, Banerjee confesses that her father procured a fake certificate by fudging her age, to make her eligible for the school leaving examination. “I was not even 15 when I wrote my school final examination and would have been disqualified for being underage. So, my father gave a fictitious age and birthday to get around the problem. The result: a new birthday and five years added to my real age,” the book says.

Going by the book, Banerjee was born on October 5, 1960 while all official documents, including the Lok Sabha website shows January 5, 1955, as her birth date.

Banerjee shot into prominence with her victory over veteran politician and CPM leader Somnath Chatterjee from the Jadavpur constituency in the 1984 Lok Sabha elections. The last date for filing nominations then was November 24, 1984. Taking into consideration her actual date of birth, Banerjee was almost a year short of attaining the legitimate age for filing nomination, i.e, 25 years, as stipulated by Article 84 (b) of the Constitution. On the day of filing the nomination, Banerjee was 24 years and 22 days old while she was 24 years, three months and five days old the day she assumed charge as MP representing Jadavpur constitutency after routing Chatterjee at the hustings.

“To the world at large, my school certificate with its erroneous date of birth is the legally valid document,” Banerjee says in the book.

Reacting to the revelations, a top CPM leader, who was a minister in the Left Front government, said: “She has violated the Constitution all through her life. So it is nothing new to her. It is not that she has humiliated the Constitution but she has made the people of the state ashamed. There are lots of laws pertaining to fudging and cheating and now the government should decide what to do with her.”

In her memoirs, Banerjee makes light of this huge discrepancy in her actual and official age, saying: “The confusion over my date of birth in not something unique. Thousands of children born in Indian villages face the same problem. I have seen people work way beyond their retirement age, thanks to their fake birth certificates,” Banerjee writes. She, however, adds that she wanted to make public the truth about her age which, according to her, would silence  her political opponents.