Somnath takes his saddest day to grave, family tells CPM: 'N-O. No'

Sandip Chowdhury, TT, Aug 14,  2018, Calcutta: Somnath Chatterjee made his last journey wrapped in the maroon and green of Mohun Bagan, not the red of the Marxists.

As thousands on Monday paid their last respects to the former Lok Sabha Speaker and 10-time MP, his younger daughter Anushila Basu explained why such a drape covered a CPM member of over four decades.

"They (the CPM) had offered the party flag. Our mother and we refused saying 'N-O, no'," Basu, who runs a school of music and dance in south Calcutta, said.

Her comment captured the family's anger at the party, love for which had prompted Chatterjee to abandon his flourishing legal career and join politics, but which expelled him in 2008 for doing what he was expected as Speaker to do: not take sides in a floor test.

Since his expulsion, Chatterjee stayed out of active politics and led a lonely life. He died at a private hospital in south Calcutta on Monday, aged 89, after weeks of illness.

"That one man was responsible for what my father faced towards the end of his life. I don't want to take his name on a day like this," Basu said.

She, however, didn't forget to praise the woman who had inflicted the first electoral defeat on Chatterjee, in the 1984 Lok Sabha polls. "Mamata Banerjee knows who deserves respect.... She had come to meet my father before she was sworn in as chief minister," Basu said.

Chatterjee's family, which did not name "that man", let it be known how his expulsion from the party had hurt him.

Prakash Karat, who was CPM general secretary then, could not be contacted for comment over phone on Monday.

Basu recounted how Chatterjee had broken down when she informed him of his summary expulsion from his beloved party on July 23, 2008.

"I told baba he was now a free bird. He asked me whether he had been suspended. I told him everything then. He went to his antechamber in Parliament. I went in and saw his eyes well up," she recalled.