The central BJP leadership has asked two party MPs who were elected as MLAs to quit the Assembly and retain the membership of the Lok Sabha.
The decision with regard to Ranaghat MP Jagannath Sarkar and Cooch Behar MP Nisith Pramanik betrayed the BJP’s jitters about bypolls in the two Lok Sabha seats in the aftermath of the Trinamul Congress’s landslide victory in the Assembly elections.
The BJP had fielded four Lok Sabha members in the Assembly polls. But Hooghly MP Locket Chatterjee and Asansol MP and Union minister Babul Supriyo were defeated. Swapan Dasgupta had resigned as the nominated member of the Rajya Sabha and contested the Assembly elections as a BJP candidate. He also lost.
Jagannath Sarkar defeated senior Trinamul leader Ajoy De by 15,878 votes in the Santipur Assembly seat in Nadia district. Nisith Pramanik won from Dinhata in Cooch Behar district, trouncing Trinamul’s Udayan Guha by 57 votes.
The Santipur Assembly constituency is part of the Ranaghat Lok Sabha seat.
The Dinhata Assembly seat falls in the Cooch Behar Lok Sabha segment.
“I have been instructed by the party to resign as the MLA. I will continue as the MP of Cooch Behar. Once the byelection is announced in Dinhata, the party will field a suitable candidate and all of us will toil to increase the margin,” Pramanik said on Tuesday.
The fact that the BJP was working on such a plan was evident last week when unlike other party winners who took oath in the Assembly, both Pramanik and Sarkar stayed away. The decision of the duo continuing as MPs was taken at a BJP meeting in Delhi on Saturday, party insiders said.
“If these two MPs continue as members of the Assembly, they will have to resign from Parliament, which would necessitate bypolls in the two Lok Sabha seats. It seems the BJP wants to retain the Lok Sabha seats instead of taking the challenge of bypolls,” said a political observer.
Although Sarkar and Pramanik hadn’t taken oath as MLAs, they still have to quit the Assembly. This is because both received winners’ certificates and the Election Commission of India handed over the list of candidates who won the polls to the governor.
Cooch Behar MP Nisith Pramanik. File photo
Contacted, the Ranaghat MP gave a terse reaction. “We fought the Assembly elections according to the directive of the party. We will resign, too, if the party asks us to. There is no question of personal choice,” said Sarkar.
The BJP’s decision to ask Sarkar and Pramanik to continue as MPs and face the Assembly bypolls in Santipur and Dinhata didn’t go down well with a section of party leaders in Cooch Behar.
A BJP leader in Cooch Behar said it would have been better to let Pramanik continue as the MLA of Dinhata. According to him, instead of contesting the Assembly bypoll, the BJP should have asked Pramanik to resign as the MP and opted for the Lok Sabha byelection.
“In the seven Assembly segments of Cooch Behar (Lok Sabha seat), we won in six. The Lok Sabha byelection would have been a better choice. We would have won the Lok Sabha seat again. We will retain the Dinhata Assembly seat as well. But because of this decision, we are sending out a message that we are not confident,” he said.
