Somen Mitra a wily politician who forged friendships with rivals but failed to check Cong's decline

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    Kolkata, Jul 30 (PTI) West Bengal Congress chief Somen
Mitra, who died on Thursday, will go down in history as a
leader who could make friends with rivals with the consummate
ease of a political craftsman but failed to prevent a
debilitating split in the party and presided over its gradual
decline.
    The split sowed the seeds for the formation of the
Trinamool (grassroots) Congress led by a fiery Mamata Banerjee
who, in the years that followed, decimated both the mighty
Left and the Congress.
    A known bete noire of West Bengal Chief Minister
Mamata Banerjee, it was during Mitra's second term as Congress
president in the late 1990s that his party lost the status of
the principal opposition to the then seemingly invincible Left
Front to the TMC.
    Mitra passed away at a city hospital in the early
hours of Thursday aged 78. He was in the hospital for 17 days
due to heart and kidney problems. He died following a cardiac
arrest, hospital sources said.
    Born on December 31, 1941, in Jessore district of the
erstwhile East Bengal (now Bangladesh), Mitra was the eldest
of five siblings.
    A stalwart in West Bengal politics, Mitra cut his
teeth in politics during the tumultuous 1960s as a student
leader.
    After his baptism in politics as a student leader in
1967, when Bengal had its first non-Congress government,
Mitra, through his organisational and oratorical skills,
quickly rose through the ranks and became one of the most
popular leaders of the party along with late union minister
Priya Ranjan Dasmunsi.
     Mentored by Congress stalwarts like A B A Ghani Khan
Chowdhury, Mitra's first brush with electoral politics
happened in 1972 when he became the youngest MLA in the West
Bengal Assembly from the Sealdah seat at the age of 26.
    Except for 1977, Mitra continued to win the Sealdah
assembly segment, which has now ceased to exist after
delimitation, for six consecutive terms from 1982 to 2006.
    Addressed as 'Chhorada' (younger brother) by his
supporters, Mitra was one of the most firebrand politicians in
the 1960s and 1970s, and had played a crucial role in the
fight against the Naxals in Kolkata during that period.
     During his political career spanning five decades, he
was considered a favourite of the Congress high command and
enjoyed excellent rapport with the Gandhi family. But that did
not stop him from defeating Congress president Sonia Gandhi's
handpicked candidate D P Roy during the 2000 Rajya Sabha poll
by pitting a rival candidate.
    Mitra, who went on to become the state Congress
president thrice from 1992-1996, 1996-1998 and then again from
September 2018 till his death, was instrumental in the party
clocking its best tally of 82 seats against the Left Front in
the 1996 assembly polls.
    But with the Congress and the Left Front coming
together at the Centre to support the United Front government,
its credibility as the principal opposition to the CPI(M) in
Bengal reached a nadir.
    It was during that time that Mamata Banerjee, then the
West Bengal Youth Congress president, was fast emerging as the
rallying point against the Left Front dispensation.
    Mitra and Banerjee got locked in an internecine feud.
    The relations between the two hit rock bottom when
Banerjee pitted herself against Mitra for the post of state
Congress president.
    Mitra managed to win the party election by 22 votes
amid acrimonious scenes at Maharashtra Niwas in south Kolkata.
    It was alleged that Mitra, backed by the then Congress
national president Sitaram Kesari, cornered Banerjee in the
party. Banerjee broke away and launched the Trinamool Congress
in 1998.
    With the TMC aligning with the BJP and replacing the
Congress as the main opposition to the Left Front in West
Bengal after bagging seven seats in the 1998 parliamentary
polls, Mitra stepped down as state party president.
    He left the Congress in 2008 to form his political
outfit Pragatisheel (Progressive) Indira Congress.
    There are no permanent enemies or friends in politics,
so the saying goes. Mitra merged his outfit with Banerjee's
TMC ahead of the 2009 Lok Sabha polls and won the election
from Diamond Harbour.
    Differences arose between the two again, and Mitra
quit the TMC in 2014 to rejoin the Congress.
    Mitra was made the state Congress president again in
2018 as the party lay battered and bruised by infighting and a
string of defections by its leaders to the TMC.
    He was one of the chief architects of Left Front-
Congress alliance in West Bengal during the 2016 assembly
polls.
    Mitra was keen on having an alliance with the Left
also for the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, but that could not
materialise, and the two parties got drubbed.
    With his impeccable skills of persuasion, Mitra
managed to bring the two parties together again after the
elections.
    Mitra and Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, the Congress party's
current leader in the Lok Sabha, never favoured a
rapprochement with the TMC as they felt it lacked credibility
as a secular party, and held it responsible for the remarkable
growth of the BJP in the state where it was hardly a force to
reckon with a few years ago. PTI PNT CK
SK SK

(This story has not been edited by THE WEEK and is auto-generated from PTI)