Man Who Built The Machine: Mukul Roy (1954–2026)

At a BJP rally in Kolkata in 2014, Siddharth Nath Singh took the podium and addressed a taunt directly at the ruling party across the street: "Bhaag, Mukul, bhaag." Run, Mukul, run.

The crowd roared. It was simultaneously a threat and an acknowledgement: the BJP, then still a marginal force in Bengal, was telling Mamata Banerjee's most indispensable organiser that they knew exactly who he was, and that they were coming for him.

Three years later, Mukul Roy walked into BJP headquarters at 11 Ashok Road in Delhi and joined the party in the presence of Amit Shah. The man they told to run had arrived — not running, but switching.

Roy died of cardiac arrest at Apollo Hospital, Salt Lake, Kolkata, in the early hours of 23 February 2026. He was 71. He had been battling dementia, Parkinson's disease, and the consequences of two brain surgeries — for hydrocephalus in 2023 and for a blood clot following a fall at home in July 2024. By his final months, he had lost the ability to recognise close family members and was being fed through a tube.

The Supreme Court had stayed, just weeks before his death, a November 2025 Calcutta High Court order that disqualified him as MLA under the anti-defection law. He died, technically, as a sitting legislator of unresolved party affiliation.

He was born on 17 April 1954, in Kanchrapara, Bejpur, in the Barrackpore belt of North 24 Parganas — an industrial stretch of Bengal long dominated by mill workers, trade unions, and the Left. He completed schooling at Harneet High School in Kanchrapara, earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry from Rishi Bankim Chandra College in Naihati, and later acquired a postgraduate degree in public administration from Madurai Kamaraj University.

Roy entered politics through leftist student bodies before drifting into the Congress fold in the 1980s, operating under local leader Mrinal Singha in Barrackpore without acquiring statewide prominence.

That changed when he aligned himself with Mamata Banerjee. On 28 November 1997, the All India Trinamool Congress was formed. Roy was among the founding nine who approached the Election Commission to register the party and became its first national general secretary. His career from that point forward was inseparable from the TMC's organisational expansion.

Roy was never a mass leader. His domain was the backroom: booth committees, district-level equations, ticket allocation, and, most crucially, the engineering of defections. He maintained personal contact with leaders at every level. "He had all the personal details, including phone numbers, of district, block, and booth-level leaders at his fingertips. He used to stay in touch with them regularly," recalled Mukul Bairagya, a senior TMC leader.

In a state where the Left Front had spent 34 years cultivating a near-cellular grassroots apparatus, dismantling it required exactly this kind of methodical, unglamorous work. Roy did it.

Elected to the Rajya Sabha in 2006, he served as Minister of State for Shipping under UPA-II before being appointed Railway Minister in March 2012 after Mamata forced out Dinesh Trivedi over a proposed passenger fare hike. Roy reversed the hike immediately. He resigned from the ministry in September 2012 when the TMC withdrew from the UPA coalition over FDI in multi-brand retail.

His single greatest contribution was the role he played in the TMC's 2011 landslide, which ended 34 consecutive years of Left Front rule. Roy managed the 2009 Congress-TMC Lok Sabha alliance, oversaw the absorption of Left workers into TMC ranks, and maintained backchannel communications with Muslim clerics including Siddiqullah Chowdhury of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind, who was instrumental in shifting the Muslim vote bank from the Left to the TMC.

Reports from the time and since also claimed that he secured a degree of tacit acquiescence from the RSS, which at that point was more interested in ending Left hegemony in Bengal than in opposing the Trinamool.

The rupture with Banerjee came in 2014–15. Roy's name surfaced in the CBI investigation into the Saradha chit fund scam and in the Narada sting operation — both of which he denied. More structurally, the rise of Abhishek Banerjee, the Chief Minister's nephew, as the party's designated heir had made Roy's seniority redundant.

He was stripped of the TMC national general secretary post in 2015, resigned from the party in September 2017, and was subsequently suspended by it for six years for anti-party activities.

In November 2017, Roy joined the BJP at 11 Ashok Road in the presence of Amit Shah. He was made national vice president in 2020. At a Kolkata rally that year, Shah credited Roy directly: "Under his chairmanship of the election management committee, we won 18 seats in Bengal," referring to the BJP's jump from just 2 Lok Sabha seats in Bengal in 2014 to 18 by 2019.

On a single day in May 2019, Roy orchestrated the mass joining of three TMC MLAs, including his own son Subhranshu, and 16 municipal councillors into the BJP.

The 2021 assembly elections were, however, a setback. Mamata Banerjee won a third consecutive term with a larger mandate than either of her previous two. Roy himself won from Krishnanagar Uttar, but his broader defection project had failed to dislodge her.

Within five weeks of the results, on 11 June 2021, both Mukul and Subhranshu Roy walked back into Trinamool Bhavan and rejoined the TMC in the presence of Mamata Banerjee and Abhishek Banerjee — the same Abhishek Banerjee whose rise Roy had once resented. Mamata Banerjee said: "Mukul is an old boy of our family. Old is always gold."

The second stint was hollow. Roy was made chairman of the Public Accounts Committee — a post usually reserved for the opposition — a constitutional oddity the TMC justified by arguing he was technically still a BJP MLA.

In January 2022, Roy's own lawyer told the Assembly Speaker that Roy had never formally rejoined the TMC. Roy resigned the PAC chairmanship citing ill health. By 2023, he was diagnosed with dementia and Parkinson's. During a visit to Delhi that year, he publicly claimed he was still a BJP MLA — a statement his family attributed to cognitive decline.

In November 2025, the Calcutta High Court disqualified him under the Tenth Schedule of the Constitution for violating the anti-defection law. The Supreme Court stayed the order in January 2026. He died a month later, the case unresolved.

Prime Minister Modi mourned him on social media, writing that Roy would be remembered for his "political experience and efforts to serve society." Mamata Banerjee said she was "deeply shocked and grieved," and called him a "long-time political colleague and comrade-in-arms."

The tributes from both — leaders of parties Roy had served and abandoned — said something about the peculiar position he occupied: feared, used, and eulogised by each side in turn.

Roy did not leave behind a constituency of followers. He left behind a method. The systematic engineering of defections — from the Left to the TMC, from the TMC to the BJP, and back again — became the defining idiom of Bengal's post-Left political culture. Both parties have practised it at scale ever since.

What Roy invented as a tactical instrument, others have since inherited as standard operating procedure.