In hindsight, Abhijit Gangopadhyay was a politician in waiting — a fact of which, if anything, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee had a surfeit of advance warnings. What brought Judge Gangopadhyay out from the relative facelessness that normally adorns the judiciary? That too, to being a personage whose name was ordinarily resident on the front pages and prime-time debates? A near-mission mode stance against the Trinamool Congress. From the pulpits of the High Court, he delivered one verdict after another on charges of corruption involving TMC leaders. A mortifying sequence of moral setbacks for Didi, it peeled away the layers of popular legitimacy for her party. The judge, at that time, came off as a crusader against unscrupulous politics — one who believed in doing the right thing even against the odds. A knight in shining armour.When that armour willingly took on a saffron coating, barely a couple of months ahead of the Lok Sabha polls, it did two things. First, it retrospectively cast his past judgments in an uncertain and dubious light. Not actively negating them, because judgments are finally made on evidences, but certainly invoking the textbook description of pre-judice. As a consequence, it has sparked a debate on whether judges should have a cooling-off period before they plunge into engagement with domains they may have adjudicated upon. (Our answer: definitely yes, unless we wish to normalise conflict of interest.)Two, the BJP has got itself a sharp-tongued member of the bhadralok, even if from its outer fringes, articulating the submerged Hindutva of a class hitherto muted by Leftism. And Mamata has got herself a new foe who claims to have law on his side. The significance is pointed, given the backdrop of Sandeshkhali and the BJP’s pre-poll offensive centred around it.Born in 1962 in Kolkata, Gangopadhyay was schooled in the Bengali-medium Mitra Institution, and went to Hazra Law College. All through his student days, he acted in Bengali theatre and was a member of the group ‘Amitra Chanda’. He last acted in a play in 1986. Critics would say there was a performative aspect even to gladiatorial justice-making. So it segues well into what a BJP leader said, “Gangopadhyay’s comments on TMC’s corruption under the banner of our party will carry weight and have a deep impact.”
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