In the letter, Sircar said he became increasingly “disillusioned” with the state government as it seemed “quite unconcerned” about corruption and “strong-arm tactics” of a section of leaders.
Kolkata: West Bengal Chief Minister and Trinamool Congress supremo Mamata Banerjee has reportedly dialed TMC MP Jawhar Sircar and urged him to reconsider his decision to resign from the party’s Rajya Sabha seat. Sircar, on Sunday, declared that he would resign as the party’s Rajya Sabha member in the wake of the Kolkata rape and murder.
In a letter to Mamata Banerjee, Jawhar Sircar announced his resignation from the Rajya Sabha following the rape and murder of a doctor at Kolkata’s RG Kar Hospital. He also urged the TMC chief to “save the state.”
He further added that he would travel to Delhi to submit his resignation to Rajya Sabha chairman Jagdeep Dhankar. According to an India Today report, citing sources, after Sircar’s decision, Mamata Banerjee called him and urged him to reconsider his decision to quit as a TMC Rajya Sabha member.
Sircar also wrote that he had thought Mamata Banerjee would interfere in the “old Mamata style.”
“I thought you would interfere in the ongoing movement in the old Mamata style, but I did not see it,” he said adding that ongoing agitation of doctors was against the “unchecked overbearing attitude of the favoured few and the corrupt”.
TMC MP Jawhar Sircar Says He’ll Resign Over RG Kar Horror, Corruption
In the letter, Sircar said he became increasingly “disillusioned” with the state government as it seemed “quite unconcerned” about corruption and “strong-arm tactics” of a section of leaders.
Terming the protests over the doctor’s death spontaneous, the retired IAS officer said he had not seen “such angst and total no-confidence” against a government, even when it was saying things that were correct or factual.
“The primary purpose of joining as an MP, without any direct involvement in party politics, was that it offered an excellent forum to carry on the struggle against the autocratic and communal politics of the BJP and its Prime Minister. To that extent, I have some satisfaction and my several interventions in parliament…,” he said in the letter.
Sircar said that in 2022, a year after he joined the TMC, he was “quite shocked” to see the “open evidence of corruption” that former education minister Partha Chatterjee had indulged in.
“I made a public statement that corruption must be tackled by the party and government, but I was heckled by senior leaders in the party. I did not resign then as I had hoped that you would carry on your public campaign against ‘cut money’ and corruption that you had started a year earlier,” he said.
The former bureaucrat said that he was persuaded by well-wishers to remain an MP to “carry on the battle” against “a regime that is the greatest ever threat to Indian democracy and civil liberties”.
“Though I carried on my task in parliament with fervour, I became increasingly disillusioned as the state government seemed quite unconcerned about corruption and the increasing strong-arm tactics of a section of leaders,” he said.