Amid the ongoing feud with the Bharatiya Janata Party’s national vice-president Dilip Ghosh, former Meghalaya governor and party leader Tathagata Roy on Sunday confirmed that he was not mulling quitting the party voluntarily. He intends to remain as the party’s “conscience-keeper” and said he would have revealed many more “secrets” if he was quitting the party, in what appeared to be a tongue-in-cheek remark.
Taking to Twitter, Roy said, “I have been deluged with phone calls since yesterday. Let me assure you that I am not leaving the party voluntarily. I am currently an ordinary member. In this situation, I will continue to play the role of the conscience-keeper of the party. If I were to leave the party, I would have leaked all the secrets, but it is not happening now,” he further said in a tweet in Bengali.
The feud between Roy and Bengal BJP’s leadership goes back to the recently concluded state assembly elections in May 2021, in which the party had bitterly lost a high-stakes battle to chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress. Roy had particularly criticised, and often in public forums such as Twitter, the leadership of Kailash Vijayvargiya, Dilip Ghosh, Arvind Menon and Shiv Prakash, BJP’s senior leaders in the state.
{{/usCountry}}The feud between Roy and Bengal BJP’s leadership goes back to the recently concluded state assembly elections in May 2021, in which the party had bitterly lost a high-stakes battle to chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress. Roy had particularly criticised, and often in public forums such as Twitter, the leadership of Kailash Vijayvargiya, Dilip Ghosh, Arvind Menon and Shiv Prakash, BJP’s senior leaders in the state.
{{/usCountry}}Notably, last month, Roy had said he was “ashamed of some top-level leaders like Vijayvargiya as, ahead of the Bengal assembly polls, they were swayed by the glamour factor while inducting people into the BJP and did not take experience and chances of winning into consideration,” according to a report by news agency PTI.
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The comments came a day after Ghosh had responded to Roy’s frequent criticisms about the BJP’s Bengal unit’s leadership and wondered why he had not quit the party if he was so upset. “If you are so upset and ashamed of all that is happening within the party, why don't you just leave?” PTI quoted Ghosh as saying earlier on Saturday. “You (Tathagata) did nothing for the party in recent times. But the party did everything for people like you,” he further said.
Meanwhile, current Bengal BJP chief Sukanta Majumder had stayed away from the altercation. On Saturday, when asked about the issue, he had refrained from commenting and only remarked that it was the “prerogative of the central leadership,” to act on Roy’s comments. Majumder was made president of the party’s state unit after Ghosh was elevated to the national role.