Somnath Chatterjee, communist who saw danger in equating Congress with BJP

Former Lok Sabha speaker and veteran communist Somnath Chatterjee died in Kolkata on Monday. He was 89 years old. A member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) for some four decades, Chatterjee was expelled from the party in 2008 after refusing to step down as Lok Sabha speaker following his party’s decision to pull out support from the then Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government.

A ten-time member of the Lok Sabha, Chatterjee occupied the post of the speaker from 2004-2009. The sole exception to his electoral winning spree was when he lost Kolkata’s prestigious Jadavpur constituency in 1984 to the present West Bengal chief minister, Mamata Banerjee, then only 29 years old.

A powerful and persuasive speaker for his party in the Lok Sabha, Chatterjee owed his oratorical skills to his training at Cambridge University, where he studied law in the 1950s, and his work as a lawyer.