BJP MP Arjun Singh rejoins TMC in presence of Abhishek Banerjee

|HT|

Arjun Singh, a Bharatiya Janata Party MP, on Sunday rejoined the Trinamool Congress in the presence of the party's general secretary Abhishek Banerjee. He had earlier said he was visiting the Trinamool MP to discuss issues regarding jute. He had switched over the saffron camp from the Mamata Banerjee-led TMC ahead of the Bengal Assembly election in 2019.

Earlier in the day, when asked about the visit, the Barrackpore MP said that while issues related to jute come under the purview of the Central government, some of them are looked after by state officials too, and that he would be discuss the same during the meeting. “I'll be going to have a discussion with them on this matter today,” Singh said. A large number of jute factories fall under his constituency and nearby places and is a major issue politically

He further said the BJP has shortcomings in Bengal and Kerala and it is up to the party as a whole to decide on how to tackle the same. “Being an MP, I can't look into them on an individual level… I have kept my opinion in front of BJP chief JP Nadda and he said that he'll think about it,” said Singh, who is also the state BJP unit’s vice-president. On Friday, he had said he was not being ‘allowed to work properly", despite holding a senior position in the organisation.

However, when asked if he had plans to leave the party, he evaded a direct reply, while adding there is no such thing as "final word" in politics.

"Those who don’t understand anything about the organisation are giving sermons. I have told Nadda Ji everything. Let’s see what happens. The party has given us a chair, but it doesn’t have legs. The party has given us a pen but it doesn’t have ink," he added.

His comment came a day after the Union government announced its decision to withdraw the notification capping jute prices at ₹6,500 per quintal, a demand he and other industry stakeholders had been pressing for in the last few weeks.

(Except for the headline and the pictorial description, this story has not been edited by THE DEN staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)