A former journalist, Trinamool Congress (TMC) leader Kunal Ghosh often tends to be in the news himself. The latest such instance, which has seen him land in trouble with the party, comes in the middle of a closely contested Lok Sabha election during which he has been removed from his party post and the TMC’s list of star campaigners for targeting the party’s leadership.
Ghosh, among the most well known of the TMC’s spokespersons, first ruffled the party leadership’s feathers for repeatedly targeting its Kolkata North MP and veteran leader Sudip Bandyopadhyay. The breaking point came when on May 1 he attended a blood donation camp in Kolkata North in the company of the BJP’s candidate Tapash Roy and praised him for being the “most competent candidate” in the fray.
Hours later, in a TV interview; he levelled allegations against the TMC’s rank and file. “Even before the 2021 Assembly polls, the party was well aware that large-scale corruption and extortion in lieu of jobs was taking place in the school education department … It was due to the corruption in the education department that Partha Chatterjee was shifted from the Education Ministry to the Industry Department after the party returned to power in 2021.”
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Ghosh only sharpened his attacks as the party removed him from his posts on Thursday. “Not only Partha Chatterjee, many other leaders are involved in the jobs scam. One tainted minister is still in the Cabinet and the party leadership hasn’t even rebuked him,” he told reporters, adding that he was still in the TMC. This is not the first time Ghosh has found himself on the wrong side of the TMC leadership. There was a time when he alleged that TMC supremo and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee was the biggest beneficiary of the Saradha chit fund scam. As a result, he was sidelined for several years before making a comeback as a vocal defender of the TMC as its spokesperson.
Kunal Ghosh started his career as a journalist after a short stint in the Chhatra Parishad, the students’ wing of the Congress in West Bengal. Towards the end of the Left Front government’s tenure in the state, with Mamata looking for sympathetic voices within the local media, he grew close to the TMC chief.
Also Read | Kunal Ghosh: Apart from Partha Chatterjee, another state minister involved in jobs ‘scam’
Till then, Ghosh was still in the media. In 2010, he became the Group CEO of Saradha Media — launched by the Saradha chitfund company — that launched dailies in Bengali, English, and Urdu, besides two Bengali TV news channels. All these outlets took a pro-TMC stand in the run-up to the 2011 Assembly elections that brought the curtains down on the Left’s over three-decade rule.
At the first mass party event after the poll victory — the TMC’s annual “Martyrs’ Day” programme on July 21, 2011 — Ghosh anchored the mic, emerging out of the party’s backroom. The following year, he was pitchforked to the frontlines of the TMC leadership when Banerjee sent him to the Rajya Sabha.
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But the situation suddenly changed after the Saradha scam came to light in April 2013 and the group’s chief Sudipta Sen was arrested from Jammu and Kashmir. Soon, Ghosh began to distance himself from the party. When he was arrested on November 24, 2013, by a Special Investigation Team (SIT), the party expelled him for six years.
It was at this time that Ghosh turned against Mamata and the TMC, accusing the CM of being the “biggest beneficiary” of the scam and alleged that not only had he been made a scapegoat, he had also been tortured in prison. In 2014, he tried to end his life, blaming the state administration for “unbearable harassment”. After 34 months in the custody of the state police and the CBI, he got bail on October 5, 2016.
Ghosh made an unexpected return to the party fold in 2019 after the party faced a setback in the Lok Sabha elections that saw the BJP register its best performance in a Lok Sabha election in Bengal, winning 18 of the 42 seats. A vociferous defender of the TMC in regional news channels and interactions with the media, Ghosh slowly came to be known as someone close to TMC’s second-in-command and Mamata’s nephew Abhishek Banerjee who is known to have had differences with many of the party’s veteran leaders known to be close to his aunt.
Amid the latest row, the BJP appears to have adopted a wait-and-watch approach. Leader of the Opposition Suvendu Adhikari said, “This is between the aunt and the nephew (Mamata Banerjee and Abhishek Banerjee). The TMC is a private limited company and Mamata and Abhishek are its owners, while the rest are employees. So, who stays and who goes remains the owner’s prerogative.”