As many as 13 Bengali television actors joined the Bharatiya Janata Party on Thursday, NDTV reported. They joined the party in the presence of West Bengal BJP chief Dilip Ghosh.
The actors who joined the party are: Rishi Kaushik, Parno Mitra, Kanchana Moitra, Rupanjana Mitra, Biswajit Ganguly, Deb Ranjan Nag, Arindam Halder, Moumita Gupta, Anindya Banerjee, Sourav Chakravorty, Rupa Bhattacharya, Anjana Basu and Kaushik Chakraborty. The actors were inducted into the BJP at an event in New Delhi.
“It is risky to join the BJP in Bengal these days,” Ghosh said after the actors joined his party, perhaps referring to the violence in West Bengal. “We bow to their courage, that in these circumstances they can even think of joining us.”
TV stars joining the BJP could be the saffron party’s answer to West Bengal Chief Minister and Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee’s act of inducting several film stars into her party. Actors Mimi Chakraborty and Nusrat Jahan won the Lok Sabha elections on Trinamool Congress tickets in May. Actors like Shatabdi Roy, Tapas Pal, Moon Moon Sen and Sandhya Roy are also members of the party.
The BJP had performed really well in the West Bengal Lok Sabha elections, winning 18 out of 42 seats, 16 more than it won in 2014. The Trinamool Congress, on the other hand, won 22 seats.
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