Bayron Biswas, the lone Congress MLA in the 294-seat West Bengal Assembly, today sprang a surprise when he suddenly crossed over to the Trinamool Congress. He turned up at a meeting at Ghatal and accepted the Trinamool flag from Abhishek Banerjee, the party’s general secretary. Biswas had won a convincing victory in a bye-election just three months ago.
Adhir Chowdhury, the state president of the Congress Party, cried foul and said that “Mir Jafar Biswas had betrayed the will of the people, and the people would not forgive the betrayer.” Bayron Biswas hit back, saying that his win was solely due to his own charisma and that the Congress-Left had no role to play in the victory.
The Congress had earlier claimed that the Trinamool had been putting pressure on the newly-elected MLA. Congress nominee Biswas won the Sagardighi seat with support from the CPM in the 2021 Assembly elections by a significant margin against a TMC candidate. The win was touted as the “Sagardighi model,” and the TMC’s opponents said that this would be the template for future fights against the TMC.
Abhishek Banerjee said that Biswas had joined the party because he felt that only the TMC could put up a fight against the Bharatiya Janata Party in the state. Biswas’s defection to the TMC is seen as a major blow to the Congress party in West Bengal. BJP’s State President Sukanta Majumdar said that he was “not surprised” at the development and claimed that he had predicted such a scenario when he had gone to Sagardighi for campaigning in the run-up to the bye-elections.
