A Correspondent
Silchar: Admitting that preferring the TMC to the BJP in 2021 after quitting the Congress was a blunder, the Rajya Sabha MP Susmita Dev said the ideology of the RSS, Narendra Modi’s vision, and Himanta Biswa Sarma’s leadership had influenced her immensely to join the saffron brigade. The BJP in Kolkata awarded Susmita, the TMC turncoat, the Rajya Sabha nomination within two hours of her joining. On Friday she was elected unopposed. Susmita arrived in Silchar, the constituency she represented both in the state Assembly and in Lok Sabha as a Congress MP, and was given a warm reception by the BJP leaders and workers at the district office in Silchar. Susmita said the previous parties she was associated with gave her a complete opposition and a wrong perception of the RSS, but in the last month, she threw away her old spectacles and started to realise how religiously the RSS and BJP had served the nation. She further added that, unlike her father Sontosh Mohan Dev, once a strongman in the erstwhile Congress regime and a hero in politics, now she admires the Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma the most for his dynamic leadership. She vowed to make the BJP stronger along with all the leaders and workers of the party.
Minister Kaushik Rai welcomed Susmita Dev to the party, saying that her joining left no partyman in the district unhappy. “As BJP workers we believe the nation comes first, the party comes next and the individual ranks last. “ Maintaining this, Rai said he was glad that at last Susmita Dev, despite her four-generation Congress lineage, could value the BJP rightly.
Silchar MLA Dr Rajdeep Roy said Susmita and he had been arch rivals on the electoral battlefield, as she had defeated him in the 2011 Assembly election, and he paid her back in 2019, defeating her in the Lok Sabha election. Welcoming Susmita to the party, Roy, however, reminded her that a tree, however big it could be, tends to stoop when overloaded with fruits.
MP Parimal Shuklabaidya, Rajya Sabha MP Kanad Purkayastha, and district BJP president Rupam Saha also spoke in the function. Saha said Silchar might be the only city in the entire country with three representatives in the Parliament.
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