Prez poll: Draupadi Murmu to meet Bengal BJP lawmakers today

Kolkata, July 11: National Democratic Alliance (NDA)'s presidential candidate Draupadi Murmu will meet BJP MPs and MLAs of West Bengal on Tuesday to seek their support for the July 18 election.

Murmu is visiting various states to garner support from lawmakers.

"She will first visit the ancestral house of Swami Vivekananda in the city, following which she will meet BJP lawmakers at a hotel at around 10 AM," a BJP leader said.

Murmu was initially scheduled to visit Kolkata on July 9, but the programme was cancelled in the wake of the one-day national mourning as a mark of respect to former Japanese premier Shinzo Abe who was assassinated in the island nation on the previous day.

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee recently said that Murmu, a tribal BJP leader from Odisha, could have been a consensus candidate had the saffron party discussed with the opposition parties before fielding her.

Major non-BJP parties of the country, including the Congress and the TMC, have named former Union minister Yashwant Sinha as the joint nominee for the presidential election.

The BJP presently has 17 Lok Sabha MPs from West Bengal. Of them, Arjun Singh has switched over to the TMC but is yet to resign as a parliamentarian.

In the 294-member West Bengal assembly, the saffron camp has 75 MLAs. However, five of them have joined the TMC without resigning as legislators.