After working for almost whole night the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Thursday (March 18) released a list of 157 candidates for the West Bengal Assembly election. Thus barring a few seats, the party has now announced the names of almost all the 294 constituencies.
This includes the name of present MP from Ranaghat, Jagannath Sarkar, former Union minister Mukul Roy and former state party president, Rahul Sinha.
Jagannath Sarkar is the fifth MP to be fielded by the BJP. The party has given ticket to four Lok Sabha and one Rajya Sabha Member of Parliament.
The Upper House member of Parliament, Swapan Dasgupta, however, had to resign as he was a nominated member and had not joined the BJP.
Incidentally, the BJP list for West Bengal has eight Muslims, three of them women.
Jagannath Sarkar has been given ticket from Shantipur while Mukul Roy from Krishnanagar North. Rahul Sinha has been fielded from Howrah. The state party president Dilip Ghosh, who is also an MP will not be contesting the Assembly election. Till the finalisation of candidates for 157 seats on Thursday, the party had decided the names of only 127 candidates for the first four phases. Sources said that the BJP had to do a lot of firefighting before announcing the names of almost all its candidates. The party old guards are on warpath and at many places its offices were ransacked and forced to close by its own workers.
The release of the maximum number of candidates came hours after Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed a public meeting of the party in Purulia. Criticising the West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee he coined a new term for the TMC. According to him it stands for ‘Transfer My Commission’. Modi also alleged that Mamata had supported the terrorists be it in 2008 Batla House encounter incident or 2019 Pulwama attack on CRPF personnel.
