The curious case of 2 Mamatas, 2 Roys, and one angry Suresh Prabhu

But little did Roy or Thakur know that the Minister’s office had mistaken it for an official request from the West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.

Reason: The name of Banerjee’s longtime aide, who was her additional private secretary when she was the Railway Minister, was also Tapan Roy. “It was too much of a coincidence,” one of Prabhu’s aides told The Indian Express.

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And so, within 25 minutes, Thakur’s secretary got a call back from the ministry confirming not just a five-minute appointment with the Minister, but also a lunch at Prabhu’s residence.

Informed by his aides that Mamata wanted to meet him, Prabhu cancelled all appointments for March 8 and made himself available for the meeting and lunch with Banerjee, a former colleague from the A B Vajpayee Cabinet.

Officials at the ministry, meanwhile, prepared talking points for the meeting, and purchased bouquets and gifts for the lunch at 1 pm.

“We realised something was wrong when someone from the Railway Ministry called to ask when Madame was landing in Delhi,” said Roy, Thakur’s secretary.

Realisation dawned a few minutes before 1 pm on D-Day, when one of Prabhu’s aides called Roy — by then, Thakur was on her way to the Minister’s residence — asking, once again, if “Madame had arrived in Delhi”.

“We asked them if they had made a mistake and were actually expecting the Chief Minister. They said ‘yes’. When I said they were mistaken, they refused to believe me,” said Roy.

Soon, a frantic call went out to Ratan Mukherjee, another close aide of Banerjee and her former additional private secretary in the ministry. A perplexed Mukherjee, in turn, called up Banerjee’s aide “Tapan Roy Sr” who, too, was left flummoxed.

“I told them this was not the way Mamata Banerjee’s appointments are fixed, and they should have known that. For a start, the Resident Commissioner for West Bengal in Delhi would call and one of us would call up the Railway Minister’s private secretary directly. We would not call the Railway Board’s landline number. How could they get confused?” said Tapan Roy Sr.

Mamata Thakur says she wanted to talk to Prabhu about the problems faced by rail users in her constituency, particularly during the annual festival of the Matua community. She also wanted to convey a demand from the constituency to rename the local station. “I had no intention of causing any confusion. The confusion about the lunch, name and everything was from Railways’ side not ours,” Thakur told The Indian Express.

Sources said that a furious Prabhu later lashed out at his aides, officials at his office, additional private secretary Bhale Rao, who manages affairs at his residence, and another aide, A V S Rao, who looks after such engagements.

The telephone operator who used to receive calls at the Minister’s office has since been posted elsewhere. Incidentally, Prabhu is also replacing his private secretary Dr Sanjeev Kumar who, however, says his departure was finalised before the fiasco. “I am going on a training stint. This has nothing to do with the Mamata incident,” he said.

Meanwhile, Thakur’s secretary Tapan Roy says he has become wiser. “I have been told to call myself Tapan Roy Junior. But I have engaged in correspondence with the Prime Minister’s Office and sought appointments with the union ministers of HRD and Home for the MP, but never faced such a situation,” he said.

Thakur, of course, did get a chance to meet Prabhu a few days later, just before the Parliament’s Budget Session went on a break. The meeting lasted only five minutes. Prabhu’s office later conveyed that the MP’s demands were being looked into.

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