Senior BJP minister Himanta Biswa Sarma had tweeted that the TMC MLAs had “expressed desire to join party unconditionally”.
All six Trinamool Congress MLAs from Tripura joined the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Monday, a day after they held a meeting with the party’s national president Amit Shah. The six MLAs, Sudip Roy Barman, Ashish Kr Saha, Diba Chandra Hrangkhawl, Biswa Bandhu Sen, Pranjit Singh Roy and Dilip Sarkar, had openly defied party chief Mamata Banerjee’s directives and voted for the NDA candidate in the Presidential election held last month.
Senior Assam minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, who is the convenor of BJP’s North-East Democratic Alliance (NEDA), accompanied the TMC legislators when they went to meet Shah, with Sarma later tweeting that the Tripura MLAs had “expressed desire to join party unconditionally”.
The legislators who had met BJP president yesterday were also accompanied by Tripura BJP president Biplab Kumar Deb and Tripura TMC youth wing president Sushanta Choudhury, apart from Sunil Deodhar, BJP’s ‘prabhari’ for Tripura.
The BJP is also holding a tribal rally in Agartala on August 9, which will be its first such rally Tripura. The tribal rally will be attended by Arunachal Pradesh Chief Minister Pema Khandu among others. A tribal body in Tripura had last week raised a demand for creation of a separate state for tribals of the state.
