The OG in Bengal politics right now is undoubtedly Mukul Roy. After ensuring a massive surge for the BJP in the state in the Lok Sabha elections of 2019, Roy has dealt another blow to the Trinamool Congress by orchestrating the defection of 4 sitting MLAs and about 50 TMC councillors to the BJP.
But what got the Trinamool especially nervous is when Mukul said:
“It was, all along, our plan to keep people in Trinamool for as long as necessary, to make them work for the BJP from within. Now the time has come to bring some of them out, step by step. There is no rush to reveal all the names at one go and expose them.”
After the shift, the BJP now has two MLAs and four municipalities in the North 24 Parganas district of the state, where it earlier had none. In Birbhum district too, Roy has managed to poach an MLA as well as many other key Trinamool district position holders.
If sources from both parties are to be believed, at least 7 other MLAs from the Trinamool Congress, 4 of them from the North 24 parganas district, are looking to move to the BJP at Mukul Roy's behest.
To take stock of the situation, the district president of the TMC Jyotipriya Mullick, who is also a minister in the Bengal government, called an emergency meeting. That is when the BJP insinuated that Mr Mullick himself was one of the front-runners to join the BJP.
LOL, right?
All of this, however, has got the voters asking two things:
- Why vote for a party at all when our representatives are going to defect anyway?
- How is such blatant horse-trading going unchecked?
Well, for MPs and MLAs there is a law in place to prevent this. The anti-defection law states that if a legislator voluntarily chooses to leave his party then s/he is liable to be disqualified from the house. The chairman or speaker of the house issues the disqualification.
However, political parties have exploited grey areas in the law since its inception and by the Trinamool, no less. The biggest case in point is Tushar Kanti Bhattacharya, one of the MLAs who defected to the BJP. Bhattacharya won the 2016 state elections on a Congress ticket but defected to the TMC soon after. However, he continues to be a Congress MLA on paper and has now defected to the BJP.
Talk about being a playa!
The TMC has used this technicality to say that just two and not three MLAs have defected from the party to the BJP. But well, as they say, karma catches up with everyone.
Apart from misleading factoids, what else is Didi's party doing by means of damage control?
For one, it is trying to bring back all the leaders that the TMC had earlier sidelined. Like former Kolkata Mayor and TMC Minister Sovan Chatterjee, for example.
Remember Sovan Da?
The man who had quit his mayoral position as well as his ministership last November after reports of an extra-marital affair and subsequent divorce proceedings became a public slugfest. He is also being tried by the ED and CBI in the 2016 Narada expose.
After his personal life became a bit too public, Sovan Da decided to take a sabbatical from politics and the TMC let him be.
Until now, that is.
It is well known that Sovan was offered a place in the BJP even before the general elections and the TMC is pulling all stops to ensure that doesn't happen.
As for the other defections, the TMC claims they were "done at gunpoint".
Funny since the only people accused of gun-toting politics in Bengal for the last eight years has been the TMC!
As it stands now, the BJP which once coined the phrase "Bhag Mukul Bhag" is now looking to capture Bengal riding on his back. Meanwhile, the unthinkable has happened in the form of Mamata Banerjee reaching out to those whom she'd snubbed and left by the wayside.
The electorate, though, reduced to a mere spectator in this political circus, is saying,"Thakur! Aar kotoi rongo dekhi duniyay?"
(How many more colours of the world will I see?)
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