In hindsight, ex-Calcutta HC Judge Abhijit Gangopadhyay was a politician in waiting — a fact of which, if anything, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee had a surfeit of advance warnings. What brought Judge Gangopadhyay out from the relative facelessness that normally adorns the judiciary? That too, to being a personage whose name was ordinarily resident on the front pages and prime-time debates? A near-mission mode stance against the Trinamool Congress. From the pulpits of the High Court, he delivered one verdict after another on charges of corruption involving TMC leaders.
A mortifying sequence of moral setbacks for Didi, it peeled away the layers of popular legitimacy for her party. The judge, at that time, came off as a crusader against unscrupulous politics — one who believed in doing the right thing even against the odds. A knight in shining armour.
When that armour willingly took on a saffron coating, barely a couple of months ahead of the Lok Sabha polls, it did two things. First, it retrospectively cast his past judgments in an uncertain and dubious light. Not actively negating them, because judgments are finally made on evidences, but certainly invoking the textbook description of pre-judice.
As a consequence, it has sparked a debate on whether judges should have a cooling-off period before they plunge into engagement with domains they may have adjudicated upon. (Our answer: definitely yes, unless we wish to normalise conflict of interest.)
Two, the BJP has got itself a sharp-tongued member of the bhadralok, even if from its outer fringes, articulating the submerged Hindutva of a class hitherto muted by Leftism. And Mamata has got herself a new foe who claims to have law on his side. The significance is pointed, given the backdrop of Sandeshkhali and the BJP’s pre-poll offensive centred around it.
Born in 1962 in Kolkata, Gangopadhyay was schooled in the Bengali-medium Mitra Institution, and went to Hazra Law College. All through his student days, he acted in Bengali theatre and was a member of the group ‘Amitra Chanda’. He last acted in a play in 1986.
Critics would say there was a performative aspect even to gladiatorial justice-making. So it segues well into what a BJP leader said, “Gangopadhyay’s comments on TMC’s corruption under the banner of our party will carry weight and have a deep impact.”
Beginning his career as a West Bengal Civil Service A-grade officer in North Dinajpur district, he quit and practised as a state advocate in the High Court for a decade. Elevated as an additional judge in the High Court on May 2, 2018, he became a permanent judge on July 30, 2020. It took only till November 2021 before Gangopadhyay started hitting the headlines, with a series of directions to the CBI against the West Bengal School Service Commission for alleged irregularities in recruitment.
His personalised barbs, accompanying many of his orders against the school service commission, raised hackles — and suspicions — in Trinamool circles.
Once he predicted “Dhaki somet bisorjon” — implying a final immersion of the goddess along with her entire orchestra! On another occasion, he said investigation “has reached the waist-level and it needs to reach the head”.
The TMC accused him of carrying on a vendetta, but was embarrassed when these remarks got huge traction, with rival parties quoting them to attack TMC on the jobs-for-cash scam. Gangopadhyay terminated the jobs of thousands of youths allegedly recruited bypassing deserving candidates.
His order asking ED to probe money-laundering related to the scam led to the arrest of former education minister Partha Chatterjee, delivering a massive blow to the TMC.
Days before entering politics, he said, “My duty as a judge is over. Now it is time to enter a bigger sphere. The TMC often attacked me for my verdicts and threw an open challenge for me to face them in politics. I decided to respond to it.” The invective has only got sharper as he donned saffron robes, calling Mamata’s nephew Abhishek Banerjee a ‘talpatar shepai’ (straw soldier) with a “troop of hoodlums”, setting up a potential direct fight in Diamond Harbour.
As for the TMC regime, he calls it a ‘Chourya Samrajya’ (empire of thieves). Mamata, handed the sort of rhetorical battle she likes, has been no less combative, saying, “Your face has been unmasked. All your judgements are under question.” Whichever way it goes, it promises to be an epic within an epic.
