OF RANIS AND ALSO-RANS

A royal family member dons saffron robes to dip her toes in politics, and invites the TMC's censure

- Arkamoy Datta Majumdar

Rani ma, Rajmata... It's with these loaded honorifics, thick with the flavour of nostalgia for a feudal past, that the BJP has been addressing Amrita Roy-matriarch of the former royal family of Krishnanagar and the party's candidate for the eponymous Lok Sabha constituency. That wasn't going to pass without comment in Bengal, with its legacy of decades of subaltern politics having moved seamlessly from the Left to Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee. The chief minister, for whom a self-styling as one of the hoi polloi is core to her political image, took no time to issue admonitions to the saffron camp-that phrases like 'queen mother' had no place in a democratic lexicon. "They are calling her Rajmata.... In our country, all of us are subjects and there is no king. Whoever is a king can go and live in the royal palace," she said, waxing acerbic at a rally in Dhubulia, in Krishnanagar constituency, on March 31. Mahua Moitra, her party's candidate, too, let the artillery fly.