Kolkata: Yesteryear Bollywood star and former Member of Parliament from Patna Sahib, Shatrughan Sinha is going to contest the Asansol Lok Sabha by-election on the TMC party’s ticket. The elections for the Asansol seat are going to be held on the 12th of April. The seat fell vacant after Babul Supriyo vacated the seat while leaving Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) to join TMC soon after the West Bengal state assembly elections.
TMC chairperson and Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee announced this decision via a tweet earlier on Sunday.
She also announced that Babul Supriyo will be given the ticket for Ballygunge assembly bypolls. Ballygunge seat fell vacant after the unfortunate demise of TMC MLA Subrata Mukherjee last year.
The selection of Shatrughan Sinha as the candidate from Asansol by Mamata Banerjee has raised quite a few eyebrows. During the hotly contested assembly elections in 2021, Mamata attacked BJP repeatedly as the party of outsiders, but now she is giving tickets to Bihari leaders in Bengal. Bohiragoto (outsiders) were blamed for everything by Mamata, from destroying Bengal’s culture to even the covid spike.
The campaign was a success, as TMC successfully managed to defend its turf in the face of an aggressive BJP campaign. However, looks like Mamata Di has become a lot more tolerant of outsiders since then, as Bihari Shatrughan Sinha becomes their candidate from Asansol.
Shatrughan Sinha will look at this as an opportunity to resurrect his political career. Sinha left BJP in 2019 after being ignored for years by PM Narendra Modi and joined Congress. However, with Congress’s political fortunes in the doldrums, the veteran actor has decided to jump once again, this time to TMC.