Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee was today greeted by Congress chief Sonia Gandhi as he turned 80 on Friday, two days after he was expelled from CP(M) for not quitting the post.Gandhi drove to Somnath's 20, Akbar Road residence on Friday morning to convey her birthday wishes to Chatterjee, while President Pratibha Patil and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh sent officials to extend their greetings on the occasion.The Congress chief presented a bouquet to Chatterjee and spent about ten minutes at his residence.Union Ministers Vayalar Ravi and Pawan Kumar Bansal, Lok Sabha Deputy Speaker Charanjit Singh Atwal and BJP spokesperson Ravi Shankar were the other prominent visitors to the Speaker's residence.An official of the NABARD also met Chatterjee to convey his greetings on the occasion.Chatterjee, who was born is Tezpur in Assam on July 25, 1929 in a conservative family, was in the news recently after he took on the CPI(M) leadership by defying the party directive to quit the post after the Left parties withdrew support to the UPA.He was educated in Kolkata and England and obtained his post-graduate degree from the Cambridge and Bar-at-Law from Middle Temple.It was in 1968 that he joined politics and CPI(M) and three years later he was elected to the Lok Sabha from his home constituency of Bolpur. Chatterjee had won all the Lok Sabha polls except once in 1984 when he suffered a shock defeat against the then Congress leader Mamata Banerjee in his traditional Jadavpur constituency, a CPI(M) stronghold.
