Will Bengal FM Chandrima Bhattacharya get some leeway in her portfolios?

When Chandrima Bhattacharya, finance minister of West Bengal with independent charge but ranked only as a minister of state, presented the state Budget last week, it was reasonable to expect that she might have been clueless about the finer points in the document she was reading. She had no role in its drafting. 

The state’s former finance minister, Amit Mitra, who stepped down from the position because of ill health but continues to enjoy a coveted place as principal chief advisor to the CM on finance and economy, was the one, in all likelihood, who authored the document.

Whether Bhattacharya would be content with what could turn out to be a largely ceremonial role in a crucial ministry, remains to be seen. As minister of state, she will not attend Cabinet meetings on matters of finance, which makes it all a bit awkward. Bhattacharya has been in-charge of the urban development department, health and family welfare, as well as the department of land and land reforms and refugee relief and rehabilitation. She is also looking after the department of planning and statistics and programme monitoring.

“I am a trusted soldier of Mamata Banerjee and will carry out the responsibilities entrusted to me until my last breath,” she said upon being allocated her new job. Every tweet by Trinamool Congress leader Abhishek Banerjee, seen as heir apparent, has been re-tweeted by her faithfully.

Bhattacharya’s political lineage is the same as many others in the TMC: She was in the Congress and rose to become the party’s general secretary in the south Kolkata district and was also member of the PCC and AICC. But Nandigram and Singur intervened and she quit the Congress in 2008 to join the TMC in 2009, rising fast to become the president of the TMC’s women’s wing, party spokesperson and member of the core committee of the TMC.

Her area of influence (she is currently the MLA for Dum Dum Uttar) shaped her portfolio in the last TMC government: 24 Parganas district is teeming with refugees from erstwhile East Pakistan.

It has not been easy going for Bhattacharya:  She had to fight off both the CPI-M and the BJP. In 2011, she won the Dum Dum Uttar Assembly constituency, defeating the CPI-M’s Rekha Goswami but then lost it to the CPI-M’s Tanmay Bhattacharya in 2016. The party thought she was too important in the Assembly to replace: She was fielded from the Dakshin Kanthi Assembly seat in a by-election a year later. In 2021, she had to fight the BJP: She defeated Archana Majumdar by a margin of more than 9,000 votes. That the BJP was rapidly replacing the CPI-M in areas like 24 Parganas was clear from the fact that in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, Trinamool Congress candidate Sougata Ray won from the Dum Dum Lok Sabha seat by defeating his nearest rival Samik Bhattacharya from the BJP.

But Bhattacharya’s political cachet comes from the fact that even when Mamata Banerjee saw many leaders— MLAs, MPs, gram and zilla parishad leaders, and grassroots members — before the Assembly polls last year, Bhattacharya never wavered from her allegiance to the chief minister. She had a moderately successful practice as a lawyer but did not hesitate to give that up when she became a minister.

However, analysts have their doubts about how much independence she will have as finance minister, despite the ‘independent’ charge. As Amit Mitra advises the chief minister, day-to-day work is done by the finance secretary and the chief secretary. On the other hand, she’s not the only one. Many colleagues who are ministers in government have heard decisions pertaining to their departments being announced by the chief minister. Last year, Education Minister Bratya Basu preferred to steer clear of making any announcement about the schedule of the West Bengal state board exams. He, too, heard on TV that the exams had been cancelled.

Chandrima Bhattacharya may secretly be hoping that she will get some leeway in her portfolios. But at this point, that is unlikely.