Mamata Banerjee calls party’s 1st National Working Committee after accommodating seniors

“Trinamool Congress chairperson Mamata Banerjee will chair the first meeting of the newly constituted National Working Committee on February 18 at her residence in Kalighat. Designations of the 19 members are likely to be announced after posts were dissolved at last week’s meeting. The names of the candidates will be decided and all the names will be sent to the Election Commission of India (ECI) by March, as per the rule. Trinamool Congress has already informed the ECI about Mamata Banerjee being elected as the new chairperson,” Trinamool sources told ET.

Apart from Banerjee, the new NWC will have 19 other members, including former finance minister Amit Mitra, Partha Chatterjee, Subrata Bakshi, MP Sudip Bandyopadhyay, Abhishek Banerjee, Yashwant Singh, Trinamool minister Chandrima Bhattacharya, Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar, Rajya Sabha MP Sukhendu Sekhar Roy, MLA Moloy Ghatak, Anubrata Mondal and Goutam Deb. All national-level top posts were dissolved at the last meeting.

With Trinamool Congress winning all the four municipal bodies on Monday, Banerjee is likely to nominate mayoral candidates for Bidhannagar, Asansol and Chandannagar, where the party had recorded a landslide victory, party sources told ET. Banerjee has already nominated Goutam Deb as the Siliguri Municipal Corporation Mayor, during her tour to North Bengal.

Banerjee had convened a meeting on February 12 to ease the tension between senior Trinamool leaders and her nephew Abhishek Banerjee. The party faced protests over the release of two lists of candidates for 108 municipal poll seats, and the controversy over Abhishek’s “one post, one person” remark, which was seen as a direct attack on senior leaders, as many of them have been shouldering multiple responsibilities.