Kolkata: A day after the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) dismal performance in the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) elections, senior party leader Tathagata Roy slammed the state leadership, saying the party is being run by a bunch of “hypocrites and traitors”. The ruling Trinamool Congress in West Bengal won 134 seats in the 144-member KMC on Tuesday, seven months after its resounding victory in the state assembly elections.
After the defeat in the assembly elections, the BJP won only three wards, the Left Front led by the Congress and the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) won two each and independents in three. Roy, the former governor of Tripura and Meghalaya, tweeted, “Hindu Bengalis seem to be headed for destruction and extinction. The state of West Bengal, his main residence, has been under maladministration for the last 44 years.
Here the most destructive and worst people have been in power.” “The BJP, which could have revived it, has been left in the hands of a bunch of hypocrites and traitors. The result was a defeat in the 2021 assembly elections and since there was no serious reform after that, it was a defeat in the municipal elections.”
Despite the criticism, the Left Front remained second only to the Trinamool in terms of votes received and pushed the BJP to the third position in most wards. Continuing his attack against the state leadership, Roy said that he had pointed out shortcomings at various fora of the party, but nothing was done to rectify the mistakes.
He wrote, “Some people are feeling bad about my comments against BJP in public. I am also troubled by this. But there is no way. I told about those things confidentially on party forums, but to no avail. It doesn’t matter whether I’m alive or not.
What is important is that the defeat of the Hindu Bengalis is imminent.” Roy, who has been attacking the party’s West Bengal leadership after its defeat in the assembly polls, had said last month that he had decided to “depart” from the state unit of the BJP for the time being.
It was believed from his remark that he would intensify the attack. He had said that he would wait for the results of the municipal elections. West Bengal BJP president Sukanta Majumdar declined to comment and said only Roy can reply to his statement. Roy has been critical of the decisions of BJP’s West Bengal affairs in-charge Kailash Vijayvargiya, party’s national vice president Dilip Ghosh and senior leaders Arvind Menon and Shiv Prakash for long and blames them for the party’s poor performance in the assembly elections. . (agency)