KOLKATA: Internal differences within the Trinamool Congress have surfaced over the decision of its Rajya Sabha member and former IAS officer Jawhar Sircar to resign from Parliament and quit politics.
On one hand, Trinamool Congress leader Kunal Ghosh, while describing the decision of Sircar as his personal matter, also acknowledged the legitimacy of the reasons cited by Sircar behind his decision.
Ghosh even went to the extent of saying that there are obedient soldiers within Trinamool Congress like him who are in agreement with Sircar on certain points that he (Sircar) mentioned in his letter to the Chief Minister, where he informed her about his decision to resign from the Rajya Sabha and quit politics.
However, four-time party Lok Sabha member Saugata Roy and the party’s youth leader Debangshu Bhattacharya have launched a scathing attack on Sircar over his decision.
According to Roy, nominations to individuals like Sircar, who do not have in-depth ideological links with the party, should not have been given. According to him, since Sircar had made his opinion public instead of expressing the same within the party, disciplinary action against him should be adopted by the party.
Similarly, Bhattacharya described Sircar as equivalent to water-hyacinth, which floats with the tide and not against it and said that "history shames those who escape at the time of battle".
On Sunday, Sircar communicated his decision to resign from the Rajya Sabha as well as to quit politics through a letter to Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee where he cited the recent ghastly rape and murder of a woman doctor at R.G. Kar Medical College & Hospital and the general corruption in state governance as the reason that prompted him to take this decision.
“I have never witnessed such grievance and non-confidence against any government ever in my life. After carefully observing the sequence of events on the R.G. Kar issue for the last month a question came to my mind on why you are not directly interacting with the protesting junior doctors as you used to do before, ” Sircar said.
He also said that since the current protests on this issue have been totally apolitical and spontaneous in nature, it would be unfair to resist this movement by giving it a political tag.