Mistakes made by BJP in West Bengal repeated in Karnataka: Tathagata Roy

Kolkata: Days after the BJP's rout in the Karnataka Assembly elections, veteran leader Tathagata Roy said the same mistakes made during the 2021 West Bengal polls of preferring renegades from other parties over loyalists led to the defeat in the southern state.

He asserted that the time has come to undo the blunders.

The Congress on Saturday made a stunning comeback in Karnataka, ousting the BJP from its lone southern citadel with a comfortable majority in a morale booster win that will be key for reviving its electoral fortunes ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.

In the May 10 elections to the 224-member Karnataka Assembly, the Congress scored an emphatic victory with 135 seats, while the ruling BJP and the former prime minister H D Deve Gowda-led Janata Dal (Secular) secured 66 and 19 constituencies respectively.

In a series of tweets, Roy, the former West Bengal BJP president and ex-Tripura governor, recollected how similar mistakes were made during the polls in the eastern state in 2021.

"I know very little about the politics of Karnataka, but judging from social media posts, I suspect the mistakes of West Bengal in 2021 were repeated there in 2023! The same kind of favouritism in the distribution of tickets, among other things!" he tweeted.

"Cut back to West Bengal. There was total organisational madness all over, in preferring renegades from Trinamool and CPI(M) over old-time ideologically oriented karyakartas. Mukul Roy (nobody knows which party he belongs to now) was made an all-India Vice-President," he tweeted.

"He was seen glued to local profligate supremo all the time. Rajib Banerjee, another renegade, was made a member of the BJP National Executive. He left the party in a few days and went back to TMC. No prizes for guessing who were the authors of this madness. Time to undo all this," he added.

Just after the assembly polls ended, Mukul Roy and Rajib Banerjee returned to the TMC.

Tathagata Roy, after the BJP's assembly poll debacle, had been critical of the decisions taken by the BJP's then West Bengal minder Kailash Vijayvargiya, then state president Dilip Ghosh, and senior leaders Arvind Menon and Shiv Prakash, and blamed them for the saffron camp's poor show in the last assembly elections.

The BJP had won only 77 seats in the 294-member West Bengal Assembly in the last elections.

The West Bengal BJP unit, however, declined to comment on Roy's remarks.

Inputs from PTI