March 18, 2012 6:06:15 am
After accusing the big media houses in West Bengal of conspiring to malign her,Mamata Banerjee has picked journalists and owners of smaller newspapers as her partys representatives in the Rajya Sabha.
Three out of the four new Rajya Sabha members from the Trinamool Congress will be from the media. Banerjee has opted for Kunal Ghosh,associate editor of Sambad Protidin,a Bengali newspaper,Nadimul Haque,owner of the Urdu newspaper Akbar-e-Mashrique and Vivek Gupta,director of Sanmarg,a Hindi daily. The fourth slot has gone to her nominee for the post of union railway minister,Mukul Roy,who has been renominated.
Sambad Protidin is the third largest circulated Bengali newspaper,with an extensive reach in the rural areas. Ghosh has been an active campaigner for Banerjee and her party through his columns and through Trinamool-sponsored programmes.
Ghosh is not the first journalist from the newspaper to get a TMC Rajya Sabha ticket. The papers owner Srinjoy Bose is already a member he was nominated in November 2011 when the term of his father Swapan Sadhan Bose,a Kolkata businessman,ended.
