ABOUT MAHUA MOITRA:
Mahua Moitra is an Indian politician and an investment banker who was born on October 12, 1974.As a candidate for the All India Trinamool Congress (AITC) party from Krishnanagar, she won the 2019 Indian general election . She was expelled after serving as a member of the Lok Sabha from 2019 to 2023. In the Indian general election of 2024, she was elected to parliament again. Her speech to the Indian Parliament titled “Early signs of fasicism” garnered her attention both domestically and abroad.
From 2016 to 2019, Moitra represented Karimpur in the West Bengal Legislative Assembly and was the national spokesman and general secretary of the AITC. Moitra was named the AITC District President of Krishnanagar (Nadia North) on November 13, 2023. Before going into politics, she worked as an investment banker at JPMorgan Chase. On December 8, 2023, the Lok Sabha Ethics Committee recommended that Moitra be disqualified and removed from the Lok Sabha for disclosing her NIC portal login credentials.
EARLY LIFE OF MAHUA MOITRA:
Dwipendra Lal Moitra gave birth to Moitra on October 12, 1974, in Labac, Assam’s Cachar district. She has a sibling and comes from a Bengali Hindu Brahmin household.
Moitra attended Kolkata’s Gokhale Memorial Girls’ School. In 1998, she received her degree in mathematics and economics from Mount Holyoke College South Hadley in Massachusetts, USA.
Moitra was a London-based and New York City-based investment banker with JPMorgan Chase.
POLITICAL CAREER OF MAHUA MOITRA:
In 2009, she left her role as vice-president at London’s JPMorgan Chase to pursue a career in Indian politics.She later joined the Indian Youth Congress, the Indian National Congress party’s youth wing, where she worked alongside Rahul Gandhi on the “Aam Admi Ka Sipahi” initiative as one of his valued assistants. She joined the All India Trinamool Congress party in 2010. In the 2016 Legislative Assembly elections, she was chosen from the Karimpur seat in the Nadia district of West Bengal. She is the representative from Krishnanagar, West Bengal, elected to the 17th Lok Sabha.
She was named the TMC party’s Goa in-charge on November 13, 2021, with the goal of preparing the party to run in the Goa Legislative Assembly election in 2022.
She returned to parliament with a resounding triumph after winning the 2024 Lok Sabha elections by a margin of more than 44,000 votes.
POLITICAL ISSUES OF MAHUA MOITRA:
Moitra identified the “seven early signs of fascism” that she claimed were evident in India under Narendra Modi’s rule on June 26, 2019. She said that the constitution, which all Members of Parliament had pledged to defend, was in danger.
“The sacred cow that was the judiciary is no longer sacred, It stopped being sacred the day a sitting chief justice (Ranjan Gogoi) of this country was accused of sexual harassment, presided over his own trial, cleared himself, and then proceeded to accept the nomination to the upper house within three months of retirement, replete with Z+ security cover,” Moitra said in a February 8, 2021, parliamentary statement criticising the judiciary and the current government.
Because it identified someone in “high authority,” the speech sparked a commotion in the chamber, with members of the ruling party labelling it “objectionable” and breaking parliamentary norms. Members of the opposition backed the speech since it was founded on facts that were part of the public record of the sexual harassment complaint processes. Speaker Om Birla ordered her remarks erased after BJP leaders Nishikant Dubey and P. P. Chaudhary filed a privilege petition against her.
Moitra contended before the parliament on April 7, 2022, that the Criminal Procedure (Identification) Bill, 2022, is even more invasive than India’s colonial surveillance laws.
