Key Congress leader to rejoin Mamata's Trinamool

KOLKATA: In a setback to Congress in West Bengal ahead of Lok Sabha election, a key party leader Sudip Bandyopadhay on Sunday announced that he will rejoin the Trinamool Congress.
  
"I was humiliated by the present PCC leadership in the past three months," Bandyopadhyay, a Congress legislator, said. He said he would meet Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee tomorrow in Delhi.
 
This is the second blow for the state Congress in the last six months after another prominent leader Somen Mitra quit the party last July to form his own political outfit Pragatisheel (Progressive) Indira Congress which is now an ally of the Trinamool Congress.
 
Explaining his decision to quit the Congress, he said, "I felt humiliated by the present PCC leadership in the past three months. I was bypassed and not taken into confidence when the voters' list was being prepared in my own Bowbazar constituency. I was not even invited when a PCC delegation met the Prime Minister at the Raj Bhavan recently."
 
Bandyopadhay said he had met Congress president Sonia Gandhi twice in the past two months and apprised her of the situation. He said he had also written a letter to Gandhi stating it was "difficult to win any seat in south Bengal in the coming Lok Sabha poll without a seat-sharing arrangement with Trinamool Congress".
 
Downplaying the development, state Congress working president Pradip Bhattacharjee said "anybody was free to quit the party", but rejected Bandyopadhay's allegation that he was bypassed and ignored.
 
"He was given due importance in party matters," Bhattacharjee asserted.

Bandyopadhyay had leapfrogged onto the national stage when his former party Trinamool Congress joined the NDA and he was made the legislature party leader in the previous Lok Sabha.
 
However, later he was expelled from the party over an alleged move to induct him in the central cabinet when A B Vajpayee was the prime minister "keeping Mamata in the dark".  

Bandyopadhyay had fought and won from Bowbazar constituency in the 2006 Assembly election as a Congress-backed Independent before joining the Congress.  Asked if he would resign as an MLA after quitting the Congress, Bandyopadhyay, who is also the chairman of the Standing Committee of Commerce and Industry in West Bengal Assembly, said, "I believe in value-based politics."