Agartala: BJP leader Rajib Banerjee rejoined the Trinamool Congress (TMC) on Sunday at a rally of party national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee at Agartala in Tripura.
According to PTI report, Banerjee after rejoining TMC, said that he "repents" joining the BJP ahead of the assembly elections despite being asked by Mamata Banerjee not to leave TMC. "I realised that I cannot accept the politics of hatred and divisive ideology propagated by BJP. I cannot accept the anti-people policies of the BJP. I had often aired my opinions to the BJP leadership and criticised the personal attack and slander on Mamata Banerjee but no one listened," he said.
Banerjee claimed that he left the TMC due to misunderstanding, and joined the BJP being swayed by its blitzkrieg ahead of the polls. "All these promises were lies and I cannot be a party to them anymore," he said. "I am sorry and repentant now. I will work under the leadership of Mamata Banerjee and Abhishek Banerjee," he further said.
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Banerjee, a former minister of two successive Mamata Banerjee-led West Bengal cabinets from 2011 to 2021, had quit TMC in January this year and joined BJP. However, luck did not favour him in the 2021 West Bengal assembly elections, when as a BJP candidate, he got defeated from Domjur assembly constituency in Howrah district of West Bengal, the same assembly constituency which got him elected as a Trinamool Congress candidate in the 2016 by a record margin of around 1.10 lakh votes.
TMC sources said that Abhishek Banerjee deliberately chose Agartala as the venue of Rajib Banerjee’s homecoming, to give a signal to BJP that in the next Tripura assembly elections in 2023, it will be Trinamool Congress, not Left Front or Congress, that will be the principal contender of the saffron camp.
Since Abhishek Banerjee took over as the national general secretary of Trinamool Congress soon after the glorious victory in the 2021 West Bengal assembly elections, he had been in the mission of establishing Trinamool Congress as national party by expanding the party’s organizational network in states outside Bengal. He had primarily chosen Tripura and Assam in north eastern India, Uttar Pradesh in northern India and Goa, the coastal state in Western India as his targets. Recently Mamata Banerjee had a tour in Goa, which proved to be apparently successful for the party.
