Upset at being denied a ticket to contest the Lok Sabha polls from Barrackpore, Trinamool Congress leader Arjun Singh on Thursday said he would join the BJP on Friday.
The development at Barrackpore, ahead of 2024 Lok Sabha polls, is similar to what had occurred ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, when after being denied ticket by the Trinamool Congress, Mr. Singh joined the BJP and contested the polls on the saffron party ticket. He returned to the Trinamool Congress in May 2022. The Barrackpore MP, who had defeated Trinamool candidate Dinesh Trivedi in 2019 by a margin of about 13,000 votes, expressed his desire to contest the Lok Sabha polls from the same seat on a BJP ticket. “If the party [BJP] gives me an opportunity to contest in Barrackpore, I will give a befitting reply to those who indulged in post-poll violence in 2021,” Mr. Singh said. His son Pawan Singh is a BJP legislator from Bhatpara that lies under the Barrackpore Lok Sabha constituency.
Barrackpore, with a number of jute mills in West Bengal’s North 24 Parganas had witnessed communal unrest and electoral violence between 2019 and 2021, which resulted in several deaths.
