A day after taking control of Naihati municipality, which it had earlier lost to BJP, the ruling TMC on Thursday claimed it will soon take over Bhatpara civic body, the only one in the State which is being ruled by the saffron party.
TMC will soon bring a no confidence motion against the present board of the Bhatpara municipality, party senior leader Jyoti Priya Mullick said.
Bhatpara municipality was the first civic body to be taken over by BJP in June after a majority of its Trinamool Congress coucillors switched over to the saffron party days after the Lok Sabha polls results were announced.
BJP had then bagged 26 of the 34 wards of the municipality in a trust vote after 15 TMC councillors switched to it and Bhatpara became a trouble-torn area witnessing frequent violence between the two parties.
The tenure of the present civic body is till 2020, when it will go to the polls.
“We will soon bring a no confidence motion against the present BJP board. Several of our councillors who had switched over to BJP are in touch with us and want to rejoin the party. They had defected under threat and intimidation from BJP,” Mullick, the party’s North 24 Parganas district president said.
Reacting to TMC’s claim, senior BJP leader Mukul Roy, who had played a key role in the defections, Thursday accused Mamata Banerjee’s party of using political and administrative powers to force the councillors to rejoin it.
“They (the councillors) had joined BJP as they were fed up with TMC’s functioning. Since then they are being threatened by the police and goons. TMC is now forcing them to rejoin it. The same has been done in other municipal bodies too,” he added.
Located in the northern fringes of Kolkata, Bhatapara municipality falls under Barrackpore Lok Sabha constituency, which is now represented by Arjun Singh of BJP.