Mukul Roy joins BJP, calls it ‘secular’ force

Mukul Roy (63), once a righthand man of West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, on Friday made his final choice to join the Bhartiya Janata Party three weeks after he was “impelled” to exit from the Trinamool Congress he helped launch.

He was welcomed into the BJP fold at the party headquarters by national general secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya, in-charge of Bengal affairs, in the presence of Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad.

Roy was not sure whether to join the BJP or be part of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) on October 11 when he quit Trinamool Congress as well as the Rajya Sabha membership as he was then exploring to promote the new political party called Nationalist Trinamool Congress Party he had floated with himself as its president and applied to the Election Commission to register it.

He, however, displayed no hesitation to walk into the BJP’s fold on Friday when he told the media that he was “proud to be working under Prime Minister Narendra Modi” and that the BJP “will in the near future grab power in West Bengal.”

“I have joined the BJP today, I am very much confident. I believe BJP is not a communal force but a secular force,” Roy said.

In Trinamool Congress, he was called Chanakya guiding Mamata with his organisational and strategic skills. His fallout with Mamata is linked to the rise of her nephew Abhishek Banerjee in the party.