Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) legislator from Darjeeling district’s Kurseong constituency Bishnu Prasad Sharma on Thursday joined the Trinamool Congress (TMC), saying only the ruling party worked for the development of his constituency.
“I want to tell those who voted for me that I want to work for the development they demand. The Centre never sent funds but development of Kurseong was not affected as the state did its job,” Sharma told media persons after he was inducted into the party in presence of senior cabinet ministers Shashi Panja and Bratya Basu at the TMC headquarters in Kolkata.
Sharma said BJP did not make any effort for a separate state of Gorkhaland as promised in their election manifesto.
“BJP will never give anything to the Gorkhas. They only make hollow promises to secure votes,” Sharma said.
Although BJP secured 77 of Bengal’s 294 assembly seats against the TMC’s 213 in 2021, the saffron camp’s tally has come down by around a dozen because of resignations, defections and a death. None of the MLAs who joined TMC after 2021 resigned from the assembly. Sharma followed the same path.
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He was maintaining distance from BJP since 2024 when he rebelled and contested the Darjeeling Lok Sabha seat as an independent candidate against BJP’s sitting MP Raju Bista who won for the second time. Sharma got only 7,447 votes while Bista secured 6,79,331.
On February 7, when the legislative assembly’s budget session ended, Sharma told media persons that he won’t contest the upcoming polls for BJP.
Shankar Ghosh, the BJP MLA from Darjeeling district’s Siliguri seat and the party’s chief whip in the assembly, said Sharma used to stay aloof.
“He made his intentions clear by contesting against Bista. But he must bear in mind the fact that he could not even get more votes than BJP in his own constituency in 2024,” Ghosh said.
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