A day after the notification for the biennale polls to the Upper House of the Parliament was announced, TMC announced its four candidates for the five seats in West Bengal that will go to polls. The party has nominated sitting MLA Babul Supriyo, Tollywood actor Koel Mallick, Supreme Court advocate Menaka Guruswamy and recently retired West Bengal Director General of Police Rajeev Kumar to the Rajya Sabha.
They will be replacing the party's president, Subrata Bakshi, and leaders Ritabrata Bhattacharya and Saket Gokhle - both first-time MPs. But the new faces have accomplishments beyond their designations or posts.
Senior advocate Menaka Guruswamy was recently seen arguing on behalf of the Trinamool Congress in the Supreme Court in the high-voltage ED raids on IPAC in the alleged coal scam. She was also part of the legal team that set the historic verdict to decriminalise homosexuality in India. She also becomes India's first Rajya Sabha MP from the LGBTQ+ community, as decks are clear for her entry, going by the TMC's Vidhan Sabha strength. Guruswamy has been featured in TIME Magazine's most influential people list for her LGBTQ+ rights advocacy.
TMC MLA from Ballygunge in Kolkata, Babul Supriyo, who is also the State's IT Minister, has been given his next task as he returns to Delhi's power corridors where he was once a minister in Prime Minister Narendra Modi's cabinet. Between 2014 and 2019, Supriyo was in charge of the environment, forest and climate change, and then heavy industries. A banker by profession before he joined Bollywood as a playback singer, Supriyo still belts out tunes for Bengali films and also releases his own Durga Puja album.
Speculations in the political corridors hinted at Supriyo not getting a second term as MLA from Ballygunge, which was held by Minister Sobhandeb Chattapadhyay, who was shifted to the Bhawanipur seat when Mamata Banerjee announced to fight the 2021 Vidhan Sabha polls from Nandigram. But later re-contested from Bhawanipore by shifting Sobhondeb.
Actor Koel Mallick is popularly known as "Mitin Mashi" - based on her on-screen character of a woman detective cop. Mallick is a second-generation actor who has given several Bengali cinema box office hits in the 2000s. Her father, Ranjit Mallick, is a veteran Bengali actor. Married to Nishpal Singh, one of the top Bengali film producers in Kolkata, she will be the first in her family to enter the political arena.
But the most talked about name amongst the four would be IPS officer Rajeev Kumar, the former acting West Bengal Director General of Police, who retired on January 31. Known as Mamata Banerjee's trusted lieutenant amongst a few in the administrative circle, Kumar had a massive standoff with the CBI back in 2019, in the Saradha Chitfund scam probe. Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee sat on a dharna for three days to protest against the CBI action against her then Kolkata Police Commissioner.
In 2019, the Supreme Court granted Rajeev Kumar protection from any coercive action and directed CBI to interrogate him in Shillong, a neutral location in the ongoing investigation. Rajeev Kumar had also been at the help of the police force when the gruesome RG Kar rape and murder happened in Kolkata, triggering widespread protests against the Mamata government. He also led operations against TMC's infamous Sheikh Shahjahan in the Sandeshkhali land grab and alleged women harassment cases in the run-up to the 2024 Lok Sabha polls. He was last seen with Mamata Banerjee during the high-voltage faceoff with the ED, with raids on IPAC in Kolkata.
From West Bengal, five Rajya Sabha seats are falling vacant in 2026, and four of them were held by the TMC.
The Election Commission had declared that polling for 37 Rajya Sabha seats across multiple states, including West Bengal, will be held on March 16.
