More than a fortnight after he lost his Ministerial berth in the Union Ministry, former Central Minister and Asansol BJP MP Babul Supriyo on Saturday announced that he was quitting politics.
He would not link this decision to his being dropped as a Minister. He would also not make it clear whether he was joining any other party while commencing his Bengali Facebook post with the word “Alvida or (goodbye!).”
“Alvida! I am not going to any political party, TMC, Congress, CPI(M) nobody has called me … I am not going anywhere … one does not need to be in politics to do social work,” he wrote.
Supriyo, an actor-singer-turned-politician who joined the BJP ahead of 2014 general elections to win the Asansol seat, was later made a Minister of State — a post that he retained till recently when he, along with 11 other Ministers including his State party colleague Debashree Chowdhury, was dropped.
Supriyo said he had on several occasions went to Home Minister Amit Shah and BJP president JP Nadda to express his desire to quit but on all the occasions he was “inspired” against doing so.
“Over the past few days, I have repeatedly taken the decision to leave politics to Amit Shah and Naddaji and I am eternally grateful to them for inspiring me in every way,” he said.
He added he would never forget “their love and so I will never again show them the audacity to say the same thing again … So to repeat the same thing again, somewhere they may think that I am bargaining for a ‘position’… That’s not true…”
On the question as to “why I left politics?” or on whether there was “anything to do with leaving the Ministry”, he wrote there was a “big difference between 2014 and 2019.” Supriyo is also likely to resign his Lok Sabha membership, sources said.
The Trinamool Congress leadership was tightlipped about his decision to quit but a senior leader and a Minister privately said that “it was a foregone conclusion … no one with self-respect can live in that party … we know how he was humiliatingly dropped from the Ministry … even Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said once about the way he and Debashree were shown the doors … was it because they wanted to stoke the North Bengal-South Bengal fire?”
BJP State President Dilip Ghosh said that he had “no information about who is quitting and who is not … because I do not follow Facebook or Twitter … Who will leave and who will not … who will go where is not my lookout.”