Kolkata:
Abhijit Mukherjee, son of former President late Pranab Mukherjee and a former Lok Sabha MP, has rejoined the Congress after a nearly four-year stint with the Trinamool Congress. The 65-year-old rejoined the Congress at Bidhan Bhavan, the West Bengal Congress headquarters, in the presence of Ghulam Ahmed Mir, observer for the state party unit.
An engineer by education, Mr Mukherjee worked with major corporate firms before he entered politics. He was elected MP from Bengal’s Jangipur in 2012 after his father, the veteran Pranab Mukherjee, became President. Abhijit Mukherjee retained the seat for the Congress in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, when the BJP scored a landslide victory. In the 2019 election, he lost the seat to Trinamool Congress’s Khalilur Rahaman.
After the 2021 Bengal polls, in which Trinamool scored a big win, Abhijit Mukherjee joined the Mamata Banerjee-led party. After the switch, he credited the Trinamool chief with stopping the BJP. He also said the Congress had not given him any role or position except the party’s primary membership. He then said he had joined the Trinamool as a soldier and would work as per the party leadership’s instructions. Abhijt Mukherjee, however, was not seen in a very active role during his Trinamool stint.
Abhijit Mukherjee had stoked a major controversy when he called the women involved in the massive protests after the 2012 Delhi gangrape “dented and painted”.
“Women who are participating in candlelight vigils and those who are protesting have no connection with ground reality. These pretty ladies coming out to protest are ‘highly dented and painted’,” he said in a TV interview. “I have my doubts…how many of these women are students…women in these age groups are generally no longer students.”
Mr Mukherjee later apologised for his remarks. “The remarks were regarding whether I thought it was a students’ protest. They were not meant to hurt anyone. I apologise unconditionally,” he said.
