E-Paper
BJP MLAs from north Bengal skip party meet, leaders ask units to be cautious
On Monday, Tanmay Ghosh, who won the Bishnupur seat in Bankura district returned to the TMC. Biswajit Das, the lawmaker from Bagdah in North 24 Parganas also followed suit on Tuesday.
Days after two Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) legislators from south Bengal returned to the ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC), the saffron camp’s efforts to keep the house in order suffered a jolt on Wednesday when five lawmakers from north Bengal districts skipped an organizational meeting convened in Siliguri town.
The meeting was called to discuss a range of issues, including post-poll violence. Among the absentees, Ashok Lahiri, the former chief economic adviser to the Centre and MLA from Balurghat, and Satyendranath Roy, who was elected from Gangarampur, informed the party that they would not be able to attend the meeting.
Lahiri was attending a meeting in Delhi, while Roy said his wife, a heart patient, was unwell. “I also mailed a copy of the doctor’s prescription,” Roy told the local media.
However, there was no response from the other three MLAs; Gopal Chandra Saha from Old Malda, Joel Murmu from Habibpur and Manoj Oraon from Kumargram.
BJP state leaders virtually attended the meeting from Kolkata and state unit president Dilip Ghosh asked the north Bengal units to be cautious, said leaders aware of the development. Leader of the opposition in the assembly, Suvendu Adhikari, claimed in Kolkata that no MLA skipped the meeting.
On Monday, Tanmay Ghosh, who won the Bishnupur seat in Bankura district returned to the TMC. Biswajit Das, the lawmaker from Bagdah in North 24 Parganas also followed suit on Tuesday.
With these defections, the BJP’s tally in the 294-member Bengal assembly came down from 77 to 72.
Mukul Roy, who was a BJP national vice-president, returned to the TMC on June 11 but the legislator from Krishnanagar North has not resigned from the party till now. The BJP has sought his disqualification under the anti-defection law. Roy is still a BJP legislator on paper, just like Ghosh and Das.
The BJP outperformed the TMC in north Bengal in all recent polls.
In the March-April assembly polls, the BJP bagged 30 of the 54 seats in the eight north Bengal districts although the TMC won 213 of the state’s 294 seats. In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, the BJP bagged 18 of the state’s 42 seats. In north Bengal, it secured seven of the eight seats.
Though the BJP won 30 assembly seats in north Bengal, its total tally came down from 77 to 75 as two MLAs from north Bengal did not take oath and resigned from the assembly to retain their Lok Sabha seats. One of them, Nisith Pramanik, was made Union minister of state for home affairs during the last cabinet reshuffle.
Adhikari alleged that the TMC was making desperate efforts to engineer defections. “But Mamata Banerjee will not succeed. I have already sent letters to Ghosh and Das, asking them to explain why they should not be charged under anti-defection law. Rest of our MLAs are united,” said Ghosh.
TMC state general secretary Kunal Ghosh took a potshot at Adhikari. “The BJP inducted leaders from the TMC amid much fanfare before the assembly polls. Now it is realizing the real meaning of the proverb tit for tat,” said Ghosh.
In Siliguri, BJP national spokesperson and Darjeeling Lok Sabha member Raju Bista, said, “Our north Bengal MLAs are united. They did not join the BJP to serve vested interests.”
Wednesday’s meeting assumed significance as John Barla, a Union minister of state and MP from Alipurduar in north Bengal has raised the demand for a separate state comprising districts in the region.
Bista said, “The deprived people of north Bengal want a separate state. This is the people’s demand and in a democratic country people have the constitutional right to raise their voice.”
However, when asked if he and the BJP support the demand, Bista did not answer.
