Somnath Chatterjee

Somnath Chatterjee

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• Somnath Chatterjee was a (born July 25, 1929, Tezpur, India) Indian lawyer, politician, and parliamentarian and a longtime senior official in the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI(M).
• Chatterjee was born in what is now Assam state, northeastern India, but he grew up in Calcutta (now Kolkata).

• His father, Nirmal Chandra Chatterjee, was a lawyer, jurist, and parliamentarian who was a prominent member of the Hindu Mahasabha.
• He served 10 terms in the Lok Sabha (lower chamber of the Indian parliament) between 1971 and 2009, the last of which (2004–09) was as its speaker.
• Chatterjee died at a private hospital in Kolkata on 13 August 2018 morning.

Education

• Somnath was educated at Mitra Institution School, Presidency College and then the University of Calcutta in Calcutta.
• He also attended Jesus College, Cambridge and graduating with a B.A. in 1952 and an M.A. in 1957, both in law.
• He took up legal practice as an advocate at the Calcutta High Court before joining active politics.

Politics

• Somnath Chatterjee was a member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI(M)) from 1973 to 2008.
• In 1971, he was nominated to contest an interim election caused by the death of his father, who had been elected from that constituency.
• He became a Member of the Lok Sabha in 1971 and was elected the first time as an independent candidate supported by the CPI(M). Subsequently, he was re-elected nine times, except once when he lost to Mamata Banerjee in the Jadavpur Lok Sabha constituency in 1984.
• From 1989 until 2004 he was the leader of his party in the Lok Sabha. He was elected for the tenth time in 2004 as a member of the 14th Lok Sabha from Bolpur Lok Sabha constituency, which is considered to be a CPI(M) stronghold.
• Following the 2004 election, he was appointed as the pro tem speaker and subsequently on 4 June 2004 he was unanimously elected as the Speaker of the 14th Lok Sabha.
• He was the person to become Speaker after assuming second pro tem Speaker after Ganesh Vasudev Malvankar to achieve this feat.

Expulsion

• In mid-2008 Chatterjee refused to step down from office after the CPI(M) had withdrawn its support from the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) coalition government over the issue of a civilian nuclear agreement between India and the United States.
• He argued that the speaker’s post was apolitical and not tied to his party’s status vis-à-vis the government. Nonetheless, in July the CPI(M) expelled Chatterjee from the party, and the following month he announced that he would retire from politics, which he did in 2009, at the end of his tenure as speaker.

Autobiography

• Keeping the Faith: Memoirs of a Parliamentarian was published in 2010.

Awards

• In 1996 he won the Outstanding Parliamentarian Award.

• in 2013, he received Living Legend Award

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