Bengali actor Srabanti Chatterjee, who joined the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) earlier this year, on Thursday said that she was severing all ties with the party. Expressing her displeasure with the party's functioning in West Bengal, the actor said that the BJP has shown a “lack of initiative and sincerity” towards the welfare of the state, due to which she has taken the decision to quit the party.
“Severing all ties with the BJP, the party for which I fought the last state elections,” posted Srabanti from her official handle on Twitter. “Reason being their lack of initiative and sincerity to further the cause of Bengal...”
Notably, Srabanti Chatterjee had joined the BJP in March, just ahead of the West Bengal assembly elections earlier this year, as part of a host of celebrity signings on both sides of the electoral battle. She had joined the party in the presence of the then-BJP Bengal president Dilip Ghosh and the party's election in-charge in the state, Kailash Vijayvargiya. She later contested the assembly polls unsuccessfully from the Behala Paschim constituency, where she lost to Trinamool's Chatterjee by a significant margin of 50,884 votes.
Before the elections, in which the BJP secured only 77 of the state’s 294 assembly seats, more than a dozen television and cinema actors with no political background joined the saffron camp. However, with the overwhelming victory of the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress in the state elections, the BJP started running out of its celebrity faces as the host of actors, who joined the party prior to the March-April assembly polls, began either lying low or quit right away.
{{/usCountry}}Before the elections, in which the BJP secured only 77 of the state’s 294 assembly seats, more than a dozen television and cinema actors with no political background joined the saffron camp. However, with the overwhelming victory of the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress in the state elections, the BJP started running out of its celebrity faces as the host of actors, who joined the party prior to the March-April assembly polls, began either lying low or quit right away.
{{/usCountry}}A top Bengal BJP leader said that “actor-turned-politicians” such as Srabanti Chatterjee, Payel Sarkar, Tanushree Chakraborty, and Yash Dasgupta – all of who unsuccessfully contested the polls – had not been seen at any BJP programme in recent months. Two other actors from Bengali television and cinema, Rupa Bhattacharjee and Anindya Banerjee, declared in August that they had severed ties with the BJP. Several other popular actors have also started distancing themselves from the BJP, party leaders told HT.
Bollywood singer-turned politician Babul Supriyo, who won the Asansol Lok Sabha seat twice and served as Union minister of state, also quit the BJP last month and switched over to the Trinamool.