NEW DELHI: Former West Bengal Congress president Adhir Ranjan Choudhary on Wednesday claimed that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which recently came to power in the state for the first time, is keeping its distance from Trinamool Congress (TMC) MLAs looking to leave the former ruling party due to corruption allegations against them.However, he alleged that the BJP is encouraging these legislators to form a separate group, as this would allow the saffron party to have its way in the state assembly.Choudhary’s remarks come at a time when TMC supremo Mamata Banerjee, who was voted out as chief minister after 15 years in office, is facing a rebellion within the party over her choice for the leader of opposition in the assembly. Two rebel Trinamool legislators have claimed the support of 58 of the party’s 80 MLAs and staked their claim to the post.“They (the TMC MLAs) are surrendering before the BJP out of fear. All these elected representatives who are now trying to form a new party face one corruption allegation or another. They want to escape these charges because earlier it was the ED and the CBI along with the BJP, and now even the CID has joined in. The Bengal Police are also involved. So they are trying to save themselves out of fear,” he told news agency ANI.The Congress leader then invoked Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Covid-era slogan of “do ghaz ki doori” (a distance of two yards) to explain why the BJP is keeping its distance from the Trinamool rebels.“The BJP does not want to take them in because it knows that doing so would be like getting infected with Covid. Remember Prime Minister Modi’s call, ‘Maintain a distance of two yards’? So, while keeping that distance, the message is: form a separate outfit of your own. What will happen then? It will become impossible for Mamata Banerjee to have a leader of the opposition of her choice,” he added.Banerjee has appointed veteran TMC MLA Sovandeb Chattopadhyay as the leader of opposition. However, the rebel legislators have alleged that their signatures were forged on documents submitted to the Speaker in support of Chattopadhyay’s appointment.In the West Bengal assembly elections, held on April 23 and 29, the BJP won 207 seats in the 294-member House. The Trinamool Congress (TMC) was reduced to 80 seats, while the Congress managed to win only two.Banerjee was defeated by her former aide Suvendu Adhikari in her Bhawanipore bastion . Adhikari has since succeeded her as chief minister, the BJP’s first in the state.
