Lok Sabha Elections 2024 | Meet the leader: Abhishek Banerjee

It was August 16, 1990. Mamata Banerjee suffered injuries when the ruling CPM’s activists hit her when she was leading a Youth Congress agitation against the Left Front government.

After returning to her home in Kalighat from the hospital with a bandage on her head, Banerjee narrated her ordeal to her mother and her nephew Abhishek Banerjee, then just two years old, also overheard a bit of it. He, as her aunt — now Chief Minister and Trinamool Congress supremo — often recalls, then started playing with a party flag, raising the slogan, “Why did you attack Didi? Answer CPM, answer”.

Abhishek, now 37, is the national general secretary of the party his aunt founded in 1998. He is contesting in the Diamond Harbour parliamentary constituency, which also sent him to the Lok Sabha in 2014 and 2019.

He and his wife Rujira were questioned by the Enforcement Directorate in connection with the alleged coal scam. Abhishek, often derided as bhaipo (nephew) by the TMC’s political opponents, last year undertook a 3,500-km-long yatra crisscrossing the state for 60 days, to blunt the anti-incumbency wave triggered by allegations of corruption against the party, which has been ruling the state since 2011.