More Bengal BJP leaders, workers want to join Trinamool

The West Bengal BJP continued to be in a state of disarray two days after national vice-president Mukul Roy returned to the Trinamool Congress. More and more leaders and grassroot workers who joined BJP in the last few years from the Trinamool have expressed discontent, while some others resorted to dharna or pleas to get back into the Trinamool.

BJP which encouraged defections from Trinamool just before the assembly elections and thrived on defection from the Congress to form governments in Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Goa, Manipur and Arunachal, finds the boot on the other foot in Bengal. Opposition leader Suvendu Adhikari, who defected from Trinamool just before polls, met governor Jagdeep Dhankhar on Monday with a team of party MLAs to discuss the anti-defection law and seek his intervention to address post-poll violence.

Utter chaos prevailed as hundred BJP workers, who had defected to Trinamool, held a dharna in Birbhum district, urging the Trinamool leadership to allow them to return. They sat with placards and posters, urging Mamata Banerjee to save them by taking them back into the Trinamool fold.


“Mukul Roy was a senior leader and he felt insulted in the BJP. I also felt insulted and betrayed,” Dulal Bar, president of the BJP’s Scheduled Caste Morcha, alleged. Given an invitation, he will think of returning to his former party, Bar, an ex-Trinamool legislator from North 24 Parganas district, said.