Senior West Bengal politician and former Union railway minister Mukul Roy passed away in the early hours of Monday, February 23, following prolonged illness.At the time of his death, he remained a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) member of the legislative assembly (MLA) from the Krishnanagar Uttar constituency. This status was technically preserved by a Supreme Court stay on a Calcutta high court judgment that sought his disqualification under the anti-defection law after his high-profile re-entry into the Trinamool Congress (TMC) in June 2021.Spanning five decades, Roy’s career was defined by his rise as Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s primary strategist and closest confidant. He served as the 32nd Union railway minister and was twice elected to the Rajya Sabha. The ambiguity of his final political loyalties serves as a fitting reflection of the mercurial and transactional nature of his career, one widely seen as having ushered in a culture of political horse-trading to Bengal.A TMC master-strategistAs the primary architect of the TMC’s grassroots expansion, Roy was the silent engine behind the 2011 wave of change that ended 34 years of Left Front rule. While Banerjee was the face of the movement, Roy was the master strategist, meticulously stitching together local alliances and weakening the Left’s organisational grip. Roy’s greatest strength lay in his lack of ideological rigidity, a trait that allowed him to stitch together a seemingly impossible coalition to dismantle the Left Front. He, alongside Suvendu Adhikari, served as a critical bridge between the TMC and ultra-left Naxalite factions during the Singur and Nandigram movements, leveraging their grassroots networks to destabilise the CPI(M)’s long-standing dominance.Simultaneously, Roy maintained vital backchannel communications with a diverse array of figures. This included prominent Muslim clerics and Siddiqullah Chowdhury, the chief of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind, who was instrumental in orchestrating the massive shift of the Muslim vote bank from the communist parties to the Trinamool-Congress alliance. Remarkably, he even managed to secure a level of tacit approval from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, who were more interested in the fall of the Left than in opposing Banerjee at that time. Beyond organisational growth, Roy’s most enduring, and controversial legacy was the institutionalisation of horse-trading as a means of governance. As one of the original proponents of the ‘opposition-free’ strategy, Roy became synonymous with a brand of tactical poaching aimed at systematically dismantling the state’s democratic rivals. Between 2011 and 2014, TMC, under Roy’s strategic guidance, poached 13 MLAs including nine from the Congress, two from the Revolutionary Socialist Party, and one each from the CPI(M) and Forward Bloc. This poaching of elected representatives occurred on an even greater scale at the panchayat and municipal levels, as the TMC systematically toppled opposition-held Zilla Parishads and municipalities by inducing mass floor-crossings of councillors. This transactional approach was new to West Bengal, but redefined the state’s political ethics.Roy’s stint as the railway minister further illustrated his belief that his primary accountability lay with the TMC leadership in Kolkata rather than the Union Cabinet. In 2011, while serving as a Minister of State, he famously ignored a direct order from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to visit a train accident site in Assam, asserting he was not a cabinet minister. Later, his 2012 visit to the site of the Tamil Nadu Express fire drew sharp criticism for the perceived insensitivity of railway staff laying out red carpets and using room fresheners on the platform while victims were still being identified.Scams and post-TMC lifeThe peak years of Roy’s influence were clouded by the Saradha and Rose Valley chit-fund scams. In August 2014, reports emerged that the CBI had uncovered unusual relaxations in a deal between the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporationand Saradha Group-owned travel company. This contract, signed in January 2011, traced back to the 2010 railway budget announced during Mamata Banerjee’s tenure as minister. Roy initially dismissed the scrutiny, famously remarking that while the CBI should have been investigating those defrauded by Saradha, it instead appeared to be searching for those who cheated Saradha. However, a fundamental rift with the TMC leadership became public when Roy shrugged off responsibility for the deal, pointedly noting that he was not the railway minister at the time the agreement was struck. His marginalisation within the TMC was further accelerated by the rise of Abhishek Banerjee, the chief minister’s nephew. This strategic shift signalled the selection of a TMC heir apparent and effectively curtailed Roy’s longstanding influence as the party’s primary power broker. At a major BJP rally in Kolkata in 2014, national leaders like Amit Shah watched as Siddharth Nath Singh thundered, “Bhaag, Mukul, bhaag (run, Mukul, run).”Mukul Roy and Amit Shah. Photo: Facebook/Mukul RoyBy 2017, after being stripped of his organisational portfolios and facing a clear fall from grace within the TMC, Roy defected to the BJP, which was widely seen as a survival strategy. Shortly after he joined the saffron camp, the intensity of central investigations into his role in the Saradha scam appeared to diminish. Though initially only a primary member, he was allotted a room at the BJP state unit office and effectively served as the Chanakya of the party’s campaign. As the convenor of the BJP’s Lok Sabha election management committee, Roy specialised in identifying potential winners among the aggrieved and disgruntled ranks of the TMC. Following the BJP’s breakthrough in 18 seats, Roy attempted to replicate his earlier success by engineering what was described as a seven-phase defection drive. On a single day in May 2019, he orchestrated the mass joining of three MLAs including his son Subhransu, and 16 municipal councillors. While Mukul Roy was successfully elected to the assembly in 2021, his son, a two-term incumbent, suffered a significant defeat on their family turf of Bijpur to a relatively unknown TMC candidate. Within a month of the election results, both father and son returned to the Trinamool Bhavan in the presence of Mamata and Abhishek Banerjee.In his final years, Roy’s career took a surreal turn that mirrored the fragmented nature of his political legacy. Following his return to the TMC in 2021, he began to suffer from significant neurological complications and memory loss. During this period came his assertion to reporters, “BJP means TMC” – a slip that came to symbolise both his deteriorating health and blurred party boundaries.In the end, Mukul Roy leaves behind a legacy built on relentless transactional politics which lowered the barrier of necessary ideological loyalty in Bengal and helped normalise defection as a governing instrument.