CPI(M) veteran who became a Trinamool Congress minister: The unique legacy of Abdur Rezzak Mollah

Mollah was born to a family of land-owning agriculturists in Bhangar in 1944, and was drawn to Communism in his college days. Known to refer to himself as a “chashar byata (a farmer’s son)”, Mollah was a popular figure and rose through the CPI(M)’s ranks quite fast. He became an MLA for the first time from the Bhangar Assembly constituency in 1972, when a government led by the Congress’s Siddhartha Shankar Ray came to power. Five years later, after the tumult caused by Emergency, as the Left stormed to power in Bengal amid sweeping changes across India, Mollah returned to the Assembly from Canning Purba. He went on to retain the constituency till 2011, when he was one of the few Left ministers to retain his constituency even as the rest of the Communist stronghold crumbled amid a decisive win for Banerjee and TMC.

In 1977, as the Left Front government initiated widespread land reforms under Operation Barga — as part of it, sharecroppers (or bargadars), till then legally unrecognised, were registered and could claim credit from banks for cultivation — Mollah led the movement in South 24 Parganas in the company of other Communist leaders such as Shibdas Bhattacharya, Khudiram Bhattacharya, Palash Pramanik, and Sanjay Patitunda. He consolidated his position as a decisive figure in the region’s politics, holding sway in Canning and Bhangar for the next four-plus decades.

In 1982, he was appointed a Minister of State and nine years later was promoted to the Cabinet in the Jyoti Basu Cabinet. He continued as a state minister under Bhattacharjee. But as the Left Front attempted to shift the focus of the state economy from agriculture to industrialisation, it led to the Singur and Nandigram incidents, and cracks appeared in Mollah’s relationship with the CPI(M) leadership. He publicly criticised his government’s land policy, positioning himself as the “Opposition” within his party even as the Left Front government increasingly came under pressure from Mamata Banerjee’s TMC, the actual Opposition party, and its iron grip on the state began to weaken.

Though Mollah retained Canning Purba in 2011 — he was one of the eight ministers who weathered the storm of “pariborton (change)” that Banerjee unleashed — his differences with his party only kept growing as he kept publicly criticising it. The CPI(M) finally acted against him in 2014 and expelled him for “anti-party activities”.

Not one who could be kept down for long, Mollah floated the Bharatiya Naybichar Party (BNP) that year, emphasising that its focus would be on Dalits, tribals, and religious minorities. Mollah said his party would fight the evils of the caste system, claiming that 94% of the state’s population were from the religious minorities and other backward communities.

Just months before the 2016 Assembly elections, he was expelled from the BNP, too, for reaching out to Mamata Banerjee, his former opponent whom he had once targeted, saying, “Kalighat er moina, shotto katha koina (The ‘mynah’ of Kalighat does not speak the truth).” With the former Left leader looking to board the TMC ship to ensure his political survival, and Banerjee hoping to benefit from his stature and influence and consolidate Muslim votes, the two bitter rivals joined hands.

It worked out as TMC returned to power and Mollah continued his Assembly poll victory streak by winning his 10th straight election, this time from Bhangar, where his electoral journey began back in 1972. He returned to government as the Minister of Food Processing, thus cementing his unique political legacy.

Mollah’s political legacy is also illustrated by the influence he wielded in South 24 Parganas for close to five decades. In a way, the influence of the current crop of TMC heavyweights in the region such as Showkat Mollah and Kaiser Ahmed, Mollah’s former followers, also points to the impact he had in the region’s politics.