In a big blow to West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, one of her closest aides and former Kolkata Mayor Sovan Chatterjee joined the BJP on Wednesday in the presence of party working president JP Nadda at the party headquarters here.
Senior West Bengal BJP leader Mukul Roy and party general secretary Arun Singh were present when Chatterjee took BJP’s membership.
Sovan Chatterjee is an influential TMC leader and perhaps the biggest one to defect to the saffron party after Mukul Roy.
Welcoming Chatterjee, Roy said he was one of those leaders who made a big contribution to Mamata’s rise to the post of Chief Minister.
“He will now strengthen the BJP... Let me repeat that TMC will not even get the status of the Opposition party,” he told reporters.
Baisakhi Banerjee, a confidant of Chatterjee, also joined the BJP.
TMC has been seeing exodus to the BJP even before Lok Sabha polls and shifting of loyalties to the saffron party has continued unabated after BJP’s convincing victory in the Lok Sabha polls. The BJP which had barely two Lok Sabha seats in 2014 won 18 Lok Sabha seats in West Bengal, emerging as the main Opposition party in the State.