Roopa Ganguly: 'Bheem' & 'Draupadi' in BJP, 'Satyavati' in Trinamool Congress

Bengaluru, Jan 7: Bengali actor Roopa Ganguly on Wednesday officially joined the BJP at a function in Kolkata in the presence of Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley.

Ganguly, who played Draupadi in the Mahabharat television serial directed by BR Chopra in the late 1980s, became the second actor from that serial to join the BJP. In April last year, Praveen Kumar, who played the role of Bheem in the serial, joined the BJP.

Kumar, however, joined the Aam Aadmi Party before that and even contested the 2013 Delhi assembly election on that party's ticket from Wazirpur but lost to BJP's Mahendra Nagpal by over 5,000 votes. He later left the party led by Arvind Kejriwal, accusing it of using him. Kumar even accused Kejriwal of telling lies.

He said the country needed a strong leader and a party and termed the BJP as the "Pandavas" and the Opposition parties as "Kauravas".

In 2011, actor Debasree Roy who played Satyavati in the mega serial joined the Trinamool Congress and won from Deganga constituency in the West Bengal assembly election that year.

Nitish Bharadwaj, the actor who played Krishna in the Mahabharata contested parliamentary elections on the BJP's ticket in 1996 and 1999. Though he won from Jamshedpur in 1996 to become a member of the Lok Sabha, he lost in Rajgarh in Madhya Pradesh in the 1999 polls. He quits politics later.

Oneindia News