The forthcoming Assembly elections in West Bengal are getting interesting day by day. In addition to the parties targeting each other, leaders shifting their loyalties are changing the political equations.
The ruling All India Trinamool Congress led by Mamata Banerjee aka Didi gave a rude shock to Bharatiya Janata Party by inviting former BJP leader and ex-Union Minister Yashwant Sinha into the party.
The BJP veteran wore the TMC shawl today at the Kolkata party office in the presence of Derek O Brien, Sudip Bandopadhyay, and Subrata Mukherjee. He met the Chief Minister before joining the TMC.
After joining the TMC formally, the 83-year-old veteran targeted the Narendra Modi government over several issues and compared the BJP ruling under the leadership of Narendra Modi and Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
Mr. Sinha opined that under the leadership of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the BJP believed in consensus, but the present BJP government is following the policy and crushing and conquering.
The veteran politician’s entry into TMC after TMC suffered faced a series of setbacks with leaders like Suvendu Adhikari, Rajib Banerjee, and several others shifting their loyalties to the saffron party BJP.
Mr. Sinha was an IAS officer of the 1960 batch who joined politics in 1984. He joined the BJP bidding goodbye to his service. He served as the Finance Minister in November 1990 for the first time in Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar’s cabinet.
Between December 1998 and July 2002, he served as the Finance Minister for the second term under PM Vajpayee. From then to May 2004, Mr. Sinha served as the Foreign Minister.