Former Party Gen Secy Refuses to Attend Nadda’s ‘Samajik Samuha’ Meetings As BJP Gears up to Sound Bugle in North Bengal
The former general secretary of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Rahul Sinha will not attend the ‘Karyakarta’ and ‘Samajik Samuha’ meetings of the party’s national president Jagat Prakash Nadda to be held in Siliguri, West Bengal on Monday.
“I have stopped attending the party’s meeting. I am not going to attend JP Nadda’s meeting in Siliguri,” Rahul Sinha told News 18. When asked about his future plans, Sinha added that he has not decided yet. “Recently two TMC MLAs called me and expressed their desire to join the BJP and they asked for my suggestions, they also called me to know my future plans because they told me that they don’t want to make any mistakes after joining BJP,” he added.
Nadda who is arriving at Bagdogra Airport in Siliguri at 11 am, will visit Nauka Ghat to pay tribute and garland the statue of Thakur Panchanan Barma- Rajbanshi leader and reformer from Cooch Behar. He had established Kshatriya Sabha to inculcate Brahmanical values and practices among the people from the Rajbanshi community. With more than 30 percent vote share – Rajbanshi is undeniably a deciding factor to turn the tables for any political party in North Bengal.
The party president will then offer prayers at Anandamayee Kalibari temple and around 12.40 pm he will hold a series of meetings to chalk out plans to contest the 2021 state assembly polls. As per the initial plan, Union Home Minister Amit Shah was supposed to attend the meetings but he postponed due to some unavoidable circumstances.
To join the election rally, a few senior leaders including Kailash Vijayvargiya, Mukul Roy, Locket Chatterjee, Raju Bista have already reached Siliguri, while the state party president Dilip Ghosh – who is Covid-19 positive and under treatment at a private hospital – will join the meetings virtually from Kolkata.
Earlier in September, Sinha had strongly criticised Nadda’s fresh list of national office-bearers. Sinha was the party’s general secretary before being replaced by former TMC leader Anupam Hazra.
“For 40 years I have served the BJP as a soldier. I have to step aside because a Trinamool Congress leader is coming – there can be nothing more unfortunate than this reward for serving the BJP since birth,” Sinha said.
Anupam Hazra, who had replaced Sinha lost to TMC’s Mimi Chakraborty- a well-known Indian actress, singer and politician. In 2019, she joined politics and contested from Jadavpur Lok Sabha Constituency as a TMC candidate. She registered a landslide victory over BJP’s Anupam Hazra by 2,95,239 votes.
Keeping West Bengal assembly polls 2021 in mind, the BJP had rewarded Mukul Roy with the post of national vice president. Once a trusted aide of Mamata Banerjee- Mukul was recently in the news amid reports/rumours of his differences with the state BJP leadership in Bengal.
Already the state BJP has raised the political temperature with ‘Nabanna Chalo Abhijan’ on August 8, 2020 and now the party is taking it forward with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s address on ‘Sasthi’, October 22. As the BJP is growing exponentially in North Bengal and therefore eyeing at assembly polls the party has chosen to sound the poll bugle from this region.
Out of eight Lok Sabha seats including Cooch Behar, Alipurduar, Jalpaiguri, Darjeeling, Raigunj, Balurghat, North Malda, and South Malda in North Bengal – Mamata has miserably failed to win a single seat as seven out of eight went to BJP, while Malda South was secured by legend (late) Ghani Khan Chowdhury’s brother Abu Hasem Khan Chowdhury (Congress), popularly known as ‘Dalu da’.
In the rest of the seats – BJP’s Nisith Pramanik, John Barla, Jayanta Kumar Ray, Raju Singh Bisht, Deboshree Chaudhary, Sukanta Majumdar and Khagen Murmu had sent shock waves in the TMC camp by winning Cooch Behar, Alipurduar, Jalpaiguri, Darjeeling, Raiganj, Balurghat and North Malda respectively in the last Lok Sabha.
