Late Chief Minister Siddharth Shankar Roy’s South Kolkata house on Beltala Road is set to become a heritage building, as announced by West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee. This isn’t a political move before the Lok Sabha election, as speculated by some observers. Roy, a staunch supporter of Mamata, left the Congress party and ran as an independent candidate in Darjeeling with the support of local Gorkhas. He adopted the pair of flowers as his election symbol, later adopted by Mamata’s Trinamool Congress party. After Roy’s wife passed away, leaving no heirs to maintain the palatial building, Banerjee decided to declare it a heritage site, freeing it from Kolkata Corporation property tax.
