12-member delegation of BJP leaders from Bengal to attend meeting on Darjeeling hills in Delhi
Kolkata: A 12-member delegation of 11 BJP legislators and a party Lok Sabha member from West Bengal will be attending the tripartite meeting convened by the Central government in Delhi this week on working towards a permanent political solution in the hills of Darjeeling, Kurseong and Kalimpong in northern part of the state.
The meeting is scheduled on April 2 at the national capital and the delegation member has already left from New Delhi on Monday afternoon.
The sole BJP Lok Sabha representative in the delegation is the party Lok Sabha member from Darjeeling constituency Raju Bista and he will be accompanied by the party legislator from the Siliguri assembly constituency and the chief whip of BJP’s legislative team in West Bengal assembly Dr Shankar Ghosh.
The other ten party legislators who will be parts of the same delegation will be Neeraj Zimba (Darjeeling),Durga Murmu (Phansidewa), Anandamoy Burman (Matigara-Naxalbari), Puna Bhengra (Nagrakata), Bishal Lama (Kalchini), Sikha Chatterjee (Dabgram-Phulbari) Sushil Barman (Mathabhanga), Malati Rava Roy (Tufanganj), Kaushik Roy (Maynaguri) and Chinmoy Deb Barman (Gazole).
Bista clarified that there would be nothing political about the meeting. “Probably the Union Government has something in mind about the developments in the hills and that is why it has convened the tripartite meeting. Political forces who are in favour of the development at the hills should participate in the meeting,” Bista said.
Echoing him, Shankar Ghosh said that already the Union government under the leadership of the Prime Minister Narendra Modi had done enough for the development of North Bengal. “But more is needed and for that, the tripartite meeting has been called,” he added.
However, the ruling Trinamool Congress has claimed that the tripartite meeting has been convened keeping their leaders in the dark. “We are not aware of any such meeting. This will be anyway a farcical exercise since BJP had always politics with hills instead of concentrating on actual development,” said Trinamool Congress’s Darjeeling Hill President and former Rajya Sabha member Santa Chhetri.