When Mithun Chakraborty resigned from Rajya Sabha citing health reasons
Actor Mithun Chakraborty is present at the Brigade Parade ground in Kolkata to attend the mega rally of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. However, there has been no confirmation till now from the BJP side whether he will also be joining the party ahead of the crucial West Bengal Assembly election 2021.
If Chakraborty joins the BJP, it will be an extension of his long tryst with politics which apparently started with his links with the Naxalite movement in West Bengal.
After building a successful Bollywood career, his association with Bengal politics got renewed after Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool Congress (TMC) came to power in 2011. In 2014, the party sent him to the Rajya Sabha but the Saradha scam apparently tarnished his image as he was the brand ambassador of the group that ran a ponzi scam in Bengal. Many other TMC leaders were associated with the group.
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During the investigation into the scam, Chakraborty was interrogated and returned ₹1.19 crore to the Enforcement Directorate after tax deduction from ₹2 crore that he had got from the group for being their brand ambassador. This happened in 2015. In 2016, Chakraborty resigned from the Rajya Sabha citing health reasons. His attendance was also poor as he had attended Parliament for three days during his stint.
Following this, he distanced himself from both politics and the public eye and was believed to have undergone treatment abroad for his chronic back problem.
In 2019, Mithun Chakraborty was seen in filmmaker Vivek Agnihotri's The Tashkent Files. He will also be seen in the same director's upcoming movie The Kashmir Files, which was supposed to be released in 2020, but got delayed owing to the Covid-19 pandemic.
His re-emergence in the political space and speculations over it began with his meeting with RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat, though the actor said it was a breakfast meeting and there was no politics in it.