A CORRESPONDENT
SILCHAR: To defeat BJP, a political force of like-minded parties excluding the Congress was the only alternative, said TMC MP Sushmita Dev. On Thursday, Dev inaugurated the office of the Cachar unit of All India Trinamool Congress at Park Road here in Silchar. Addressing a workers' meet, Dev said, the state head quarter of the TMC would invariably be set up in Guwahati as the party would come up as the main opposition in Assam. Elaborating her point, Susmita, who quit Congress a few months back, said the opposition leaders in Assam were actually fighting among themselves to be in the good books of Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma. There is absolutely no opposition in Assam and hence the agony, hardship and frustration of the commoners could not be properly and honestly reflected in open forum, adding this Sushmita said, only TMC could fill this vacuum. "Get ready for a bigger fight from now onwards," she spiritedly appealed to the workers.
Sushmita, who represented Silchar both in Assembly as well as in Lok Sabha as a Congress member, left the party last August and joined Mamata Banerjee's brigade. She was soon made a Rajya Sabha MP from West Bengal. Since her joining in TMC, Sushmita had been saying that TMC had a bigger plan for north east and this was the reason she had been picked up by Mamata Banerjee. Sushmita, along with former Meghalaya Chief Minister Mukul Sangma and Subal Bhowmik from Tripura was given charge of the northeast.
However in the last seven months, since Sushmita joined the TMC, the party had practically done little to make its presence felt even in Silchar, the town she represented in Assembly and Lok Sabha.
Being quizzed by the media after the workers' meet, Sushmita said, party here in Cachar was in the process of being organised. Till now the Cachar unit had received seven thousand applications for membership. On Thursday itself 1,028 persons had joined TMC. Sushmita said, the TMC did not participate in the current civic body poll as the party was organisationally not in a position to field candidates in numbers. Further contesting half-heartedly would invite blame for the party for dividing opposition votes.
Sushmita today made it clear that in Assam, NRC would be the main issue of the TMC against the BJP. She said, people went through a massive ordeal to prove their citizenship and finally the BJP sent the document to cold storage as it did not suit their agenda. Sushmita made oblique criticism against Dr Rajdeep Roy and Dipayan Chakraborty, MP and MLA of Silchar respectively as she said, the prestigious constituency had now practically no presence either in Lok Sabha or in the Assembly.
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