West Bengal Motion Picture Artists' Forum gets new committee

Bengali actors Jeet, Paran Bandyopadhyay and Soham Chakraborty were elected as vice- presidents of the West Bengal Motion Picture Artists' Forum.

Arindam Ganguly was re-elected as general secretary while Sankar Chakraborty was elected as the working president of the organisation, founded in 1998 for the welfare of film and TV artistes.

Saptarshi Roy and Santilal Mukherjee were elected as joint secretaries, while Debdut Ghosh and Rana Mitra became assistant secretaries, a statement said after the election results were announced on Monday.

An industry source said the results showed that voters had opted for their favourite candidates and political considerations did not have any role to play.

Tapas Chakraborty and Soham Bandyopadhyay were elected as treasurer and assistant treasurer respectively.

Kushal Chakraborty, Sonali Chaudhury, June Maliah, Sagnik and Diganta Bagchi were elected to the five-member executive council.

"The elections showed that actors of Tollygunje industry have never been influenced by political identity of the contenders. The forum had never belonged to any political camp, nor will it be so in future," Kushal Chakraborty, one of the five elected executive council members, told PTI.

Of the 2,500 registered members, around 1,930 votes were cast for eight posts of working president, vice- president, general secretary, joint secretary, assistant secretary on Sunday.

There were also elections for a five-member executive committee for which nine contestents were in the fray.

Veteran actor Soumitra Chatterjee had been re-elected uncontested for the post of president.

The elections assumed significance this year as many actors of the Bengali entertainment industry - 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 had joined the BJP after the saffron party won 18 Lok Sabha seats in West Bengal last year.

The Trinamool Congress has celebrity MPs like Mimi Chakraborty, Nusrat Jahan and Dev and actors like June Malia, Indrani Halder, Rudranil Ghosh and director-actor Arindam Sil in its fold.