15,000 TMC, Congress and RSP workers to join BJP after Mamata Banerjee commemorates ‘Shahid Divas’ in Bengal

In Balurghat of Bengal, more than 15,000 workers of the Trinamool Congress, the Congress led by its district president and members of the Revolutionary Socialist Party are going to join the Bharatiya Janata Party.

It’s former TMC leader Mukul Roy, now a prominent leader of the BJP, who is engineering this mass defection from three parties. On getting the news of a few thousand defections from a source, when MyNation contacted Roy, he told this correspondent that more than 15,000 workers of the aforementioned parties would join the BJP.

BJP’s leader in charge of Bengal, Kailash Vijayvargiya, will be present on the occasion.

BJP’s State unit president Dilip Ghosh will preside over a similar programme in Malda, making hundreds of TMC members join his party, and then join Mukul Roy in Balurghat.

This mass exodus from the ruling and former ruling parties of Bengal to the BJP, seen as the main challenger to power in the Lok Sabha election of 2019 and the State Assembly election the next year, will happen right after the TMC, led by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, commemorates ‘Shahid Divas’.

While the International Mother Language Day, 21 February, is known as Shahid Divas to Bengalis at large, belonging to both Bangladesh and the Indian province of Bengal, the TMC and a section of the Congress remember 21 July by that name.

This day in 1993, the police under the Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led Left Front government had opened fire on the then undivided opposition party’s demonstrators, killing 13 political activists. Bengal has been one of the most politically violent States of the country since the rise and fall of Naxalism in the 1960s.

More than 6,000 police personnel have been deployed in various locations of public meetings including Kolkata as a security measure.

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