JOIN USMukul Roy removed from yet another post in TMC
The process of shunting out Trinamool Congress national general secretary Mukul Roy gathered steam on Friday as he was stripped of yet another official title by the party.
Roy was removed as chairman of the Trinamool Congress Parliamentary Party.
The step was taken almost silently, with no formal announcement made by the party. It set up an eight-member steering committee on Thursday to decide the party's Parliamentary strategy, and Roy’s name was not in the list.
A Rajya Sabha member, Roy was the leader of the party in Parliament. With 36 members in both Houses, the Trinamool is one of the largest parties in Parliament, next only to the BJP, the Congress and the AIADMK. Soon after it became public and began being discussed in whispers within political circles, Roy reportedly met senior BJP leaders and Union ministers Arun Jaitley and Rajnath Singh, fuelling rumours that he might joining the saffron party.
Speculations have been rife for a few weeks that he could either float his own outfit and join the NDA as an ally, or join the BJP itself. Roy, however, has remained silent on the issue, calling himself “a loyal soldier of the Trinamool” even till last week.
The Trinamool working committee, which is scheduled to meet in Kolkata on Saturday, is expected to take a final call on Roy, who seems to have grown even more distant from party chairperson Mamata Banerjee despite being a founder member of the Trinamool and being considered second in command.
He even served a short stint as Union rail minister after Banerjee removed Dinesh Trivedi for including several reformist steps while presenting the Rail Budget in 2012.
According to Trinamool insiders, the increasing distance between Roy and his party colleagues became evident when he attended Parliament during the Rail Budget but did not stay back to listen to speeches by any of the Trinamool MPs.
Fellow Trinamool leaders also seemed to be ignoring Roy, though he was sitting in the front seat as the party’s leader in the Rajya Sabha.
Sources said the leadership could decide on Saturday to remove him even as national general secretary.