Nisith Pramanik, who won WB Assembly seat but didn’t take oath as MLA, gets Cabinet berth

Bengal BJP leader Nisith Pramanik, who is serving his first term as a Member of Parliament after winning from the Cooch Behar Lok Sabha seat in 2019, was inducted into the Union Cabinet on Wednesday.

Pramanik was among the leaders who had jumped ship from TMC to BJP ahead of the Lok Sabha polls in 2019.

The 35-year-old, who was born in Jalpaiguri in north Bengal, has a BCA degree and was an assistant teacher in a primary school.

Pramanik was one of the BJP MPs who had won in the recent West Bengal Assembly polls but later resigned from the Assembly and chose to continue as an MP.

He did not take oath as an MLA and later said he would continue to remain an MP as per the directive of the BJP leadership. Pramanik had contested from and won the Dinhata seat by a margin of 57 votes.

Pramanik was one of the four sitting BJP MPs that the party had fielded in the Assembly polls held earlier this year. BJP MP Jagannath Sarkar had won the Santipur Assembly seat but also chose to not take oath as an MLA.

The other two sitting Lok Sabha MPs — Babul Supriyo and Locket Chatterjee — and former Rajya Sabha member Swapan Dasgupta had all contested the Assembly polls but lost.