Mamata Banerjee, a giant killer

The mercurial maverick ‘didi’ (elder sister), as West Bengal’s first woman Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee is often referred to, has been a giant-killer from the very beginning of her political career. As a Congress party candidate, in 1984, she defeated the veteran Communist politician Somnath Chatterjee, and become a junior minister in Rajiv Gandhi’s cabinet.

She later quit the Congress, formed All India Trinamool Congress in 1997 and was the first woman to become a Railways minister in Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s government. Her party was reduced to just one seat in the 2004 general elections.

She fought back, and riding on the negative sentiments against the Communist government pertaining to incidents of land acquisition in Nandigram and Singur, Mamata’s Trinamool Congress won 19 seats in the 2009 elections and she was back as Railways minister in the Manmohan Singh cabinet.

She finally fulfilled her dream of becoming chief minister in May 2011, when the Left Front was decimated at the assembly polls.