BJP’s tally in West Bengal assembly down to 75

Kolkata, May 13: BJP Lok Sabha MPs Jagannath Sarkar and Nisith Pramanik on Wednesday tendered their resignation as members of the West Bengal assembly, to which they were elected in the recent polls.

Sarkar and Pramanik, MPs of Ranaghat and Cooch Behar respectively, went to the assembly and submitted their resignation letters to Speaker Biman Banerjee.

Pramanik said that they are quitting as MLAs as per the directive of the BJP leadership.

The saffron party had also fielded two other Lok Sabha MPs - Union minister Babul Supriyo and Locket Chatterjee and Rajya Sabha member Swapan Dasgupta but they lost the election.

The saffron party bagged 77 seats while the Trinamool Congress secured a landslide victory winning 213 of the 292 constituencies that went to polls. Election was countermanded in two seats due to the death of candidates.

"The BJP has risen from just three MLAs (in the 2016 elections) to 77 MLAs. In order to add experience in running the government, some MPs had been fielded," Sarkar said.

However, the party could not achieve its goal of forming the government in the state, he said.

Sarkar asserted that their fighting the assembly election despite being MPs and then resigning after winning do not reflect any organisational weakness of the BJP.

Pramanik said that they cannot remain members of both the Lok Sabha and the state assembly simultaneously.

While Pramanik won in the assembly election by a wafer-thin margin of just 57 votes defeating TMC candidate Udayan Guha from the Dinhata seat, Sarkar won by a comfortable margin of 15,878 votes from Santipur.

Dinhata and Santipur assembly segments fall within the respective Lok Sabha constituencies of Pramanik and Sarkar.