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Business News/ Politics / Policy/  After quitting Trinamool Congress, Mukul Roy joins BJP
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After quitting Trinamool Congress, Mukul Roy joins BJP

Mukul Roy said the BJP will seize power in West Bengal in 2021 assembly election

A file photo of former railway minister Mukul Roy. Photo: Hindustan TimesPremium
A file photo of former railway minister Mukul Roy. Photo: Hindustan Times

Kolkata: Capping months of speculation, Mukul Roy, one of the founders of the Trinamool Congress, on Friday announced he was joining the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). He said the BJP will seize power in West Bengal in 2021, when the next assembly election is due.

Roy had on 25 September announced he would quit the Trinamool Congress and step down as a member of the Rajya Sabha. Within hours of that announcement, he was ousted from the party for six years. Speculation was rife at that time that he might launch his own party.

On 11 October, he resigned from the Trinamool Congress, alleging that people within it were treated like “servants" to a dynasty, hitting out at West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee and her nephew Abhishek Banerjee.

While suspending Roy from the party, Trinamool Congress’s secretary general Partha Chatterjee had said he had bowed to pressure from central investigating agencies and that he was working for some time to destabilise the party.

Roy was seen in the controversial Narada News sting operation, and is one of the leaders being investigated by the Central Bureau of Investigation and the Enforcement Directorate. He is also alleged to have helped the now defunct Saradha Group ply its illegitimate deposit collection business.

On Friday, Roy said people of West Bengal were desperately seeking change, and that the BJP was the only alternative to the current regime. The BJP isn’t a communal force that the Trinamool Congress claims it is, Roy said.

Union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said Roy played a crucial role to end the Left Front’s unbroken 34-year rule. He was the key to the Trinamool Congress seizing power in West Bengal in 2011, he added.

Roy was an election strategist. But his importance within the party has been on the decline for the past few years.

Biswanath Chakraborty, a professor of political science at Kolkata’s Rabindra Bharati University, had early said Roy’s defection would be a bigger gain for the BJP than a loss for the Trinamool Congress, coming ahead of the 2018 panchayat election.

The Trinamool Congress didn’t immediately make a statement on the defection. However, a senior leader said that after fielding Roy, BJP has no option but to give up its campaign against the Trinamool Congress for corruption. “The BJP’s aim is to use Roy, an insider until now, to engineer rifts within the Trinamool Congress," he added, asking not to be named.

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Published: 03 Nov 2017, 07:27 PM IST
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