Kolkata: Banamali Roy, former West Bengal minister for forests during the previous Left Front regime, died on Wednesday. He was 85.
His family members said that the deceased minister was suffering from age-related ailments for quite some time. Besides being the state forest minister, Roy was also a five-time CPI(M) legislator from the Dhupguri constituency in Jalpaiguri district of West Bengal from 1977 to 1996.
For a brief period, Roy had also served as the minister of the then state backward class welfare and tribal development department, which is currently known as the state tribal development department.
Besides holding the ministerial portfolio, Roy had also served as the Zilla Parishad president for Jalpaiguri district during his post-ministerial phase. Besides that, he had held important organisational posts in CPI(M), including the party’s zonal secretary.
The local leadership of Left Front visited the former minister’s residence in Gadong after receiving the news of his death. CP(M)’s Jalpaiguri district secretary, Piyush Mishra, expressed his condolences. Another former CPI(M) legislator from Dhupguri, Mamata Roy, also visited the late minister’s residence.
The Left Front chairman in West Bengal, Biman Basu, expressed his condolences on Roy’s death.
The fellow party leaders of his time recollected that Roy was a thoroughly grassroots-level man, who used to maintain regular interactions even during his ministerial tenure with the voters of the Dhupguri Assembly constituency, from where he was an elected legislator five times, without being defeated even once.
Even as a Zilla Parishad president of Jalpaiguri, he was equally dedicated to his work. As an organisational man, he used to be in touch with party workers at all levels regularly.
Banamali Roy was an old-generation and dyed-in-the-wool communist, for whom the decision of the party leadership was also ultimate, and hence he had silently taken any assignment given to him by the party, recalled veteran CPI(M) leaders from his district.
(IANS)
