Well-known Bengali actor Srabanti Chatterjee, who joined the BJP before the Assembly polls earlier year, on Thursday announced her decision to quit the party.
“Severing all ties with the BJP, the party for which I fought the last State elections. Reason being their lack of initiative and sincerity to further the cause of Bengal,” she tweeted.
Ms. Chatterjee joined the BJP on March 1 and was nominated as its candidate from the Behala Paschim constituency in south Kolkata against Minister and senior Trinamool Congress leader Partha Chatterjee. She lost the election by a margin of over 50,000 votes.
The BJP is grappling with a series of bypoll loses after its defeat in the Assembly polls.
Senior BJP leader Tathagata Roy had for the past several months raised questions about actors like her being inducted into the party and given ticket for polls. He blamed BJP national general secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya and former State president Dilip Ghosh for inducting actors into the party and alleged that the party’s candidates’ choice was one of the reasons why it lost the elections.
A number of actors from the Bengali film industry, also known as Tollywood, were given ticket by the BJP but none of them managed to win this year polls.
No impact: Tathagata Roy
Mr. Roy described Ms. Chatterjee’s exit from the party as “good riddance”. Such developments would not have any impact on the BJP’s prospects, he claimed.
State BJP president Sukanta Majumdar, while maintaining that Ms. Chatterjee’s exit from the party would not have any bearing on the party’s prospects, observed that the actor may have been under pressure as she was unable to find work in the industry because of her ties with the BJP.
Ms. Chatterjee is not the only prominent name in the Bengali film industry to quit the BJP . A few days ago, actor Joy Banerjee wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and announced his decision to quit the party. Mr. Banerjee was with the party since 2014 and was appointed member of its national executive in 2017. Actors like Anidya Banerjee and Rupa Bhattacharya, who joined the BJP ahead of the Assembly polls, had also announced their decision to quit the party.
