'A mercenary bunch': BJP’s Tathagata Roy slams Bengal leaders for defeat

BJP leader and former Tripura and Meghalaya governor Tathagata Roy has criticised senior West Bengal BJP leaders for the party’s defeat in the assembly polls, saying he now anticipates two exoduses from the state unit – first, of whose who came from Trinamool Congress, and the second, of old ‘karyakartas’ (workers).

In a sharp attack on the BJP’s Bengal leadership, he said these leaders “dragged the names of the prime minister and home minister through mud”.

In a series of tweets on Thursday (May 6), Roy named BJP national general secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya, Bengal BJP chief Dilip Ghosh, national joint general secretary Shiv Prakash, and co-in-charge of West Bengal Arvind Menon. He said the four have “heaped the worst possible insults on ideologically driven BJP workers and devout RSS workers”.

In a separate post, Roy said he has been asked by the party’s top leadership to “come to Delhi as soon as possible”.

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The “Kailash-Dilip-Shiv-Arvind (KDSA) foursome” sitting in West Bengal BJP headquarters gave party tickets to “incoming garbage from Trinamool”, he said, calling them “a substandard, uninspired, mercenary bunch of people with no political insight”.

Roy said “devout RSS workers” relentlessly working for the party since 1980s are now facing the “the worst persecution from Trinamoolis”, but the KDSA are just trying to draw comfort from having raised the BJP’s tally from three to 77.

Roy, who has been the Meghalaya and Tripura Governor, had on Tuesday called three new entrants to BJP from the entertainment world who were defeated by big margins as “politically stupid”. Parno Mitra (Baranagar), Srabanti Chatterjee (Behala West), Payel Sarkar (Behala East) “were so politically stupid that they had gone on a steamer trip with TMC’s playboy-politician Madan Mitra less than a month before elections and shot selfies with him. All were roundly defeated”, he said.

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On the other hand, West Bengal BJP chief Dilip Ghosh has blamed “campaign policies” decided by the central leadership for the party’s defeat. “I think some of our campaign policies were really wrong. We failed to find resonance with the people in some areas. The policies were decided by the top central leaders, but these issues need to be analysed,” Ghosh said.