Will take over BJP controlled Bhatpara municipality soon : BJP

A day after taking control of Naihati municipality, which it had earlier lost to BJP, the ruling TMC Thursday claimed it will soon take over Bhatpara civic body, the only one in the state which is being ruled by the saffron party.

TMC will soon bring a no confidence motion against the present board of the Bhatpara municipality, TMC senior leader Jyoti Priya Mullick said.

Bhatpara municipality was the first civic body to be taken over by BJP in June after a majority of its Trinamool Congress coucillors switched over to the saffron party days after the Lok Sabha polls results were announced.

BJP had then bagged 26 of the 34 wards of the municipality in a trust vote after 15 TMC councillors switched to it and Bhatpara became a trouble-torn area witnessing frequent violence between the two parties.

The tenure of the present civic body is till 2020, when it will go to the polls.

"We will soon bring a no confidence motion against the present BJP board. Several of our councillors who had switched over to BJP are in touch with us and want to rejoin the party. They had defected under threat and intimidation from BJP," Mullick, the party's North 24 Parganas district president said.

Reacting to TMC's claim, senior BJP leader Mukul Roy, who had played a key role in the defections, Thursday accused Mamata Banerjee's party of using political and administrative powers to force the councillors to rejoin it.

"They (the councillors) had joined BJP as they were fed up with TMC's functioning. Since then they are being threatened by the police and goons. TMC is now forcing them to rejoin it. The same has been done in other municipal bodies too," he added.

Located in the northern fringes of Kolkata, Bhatapara municipality falls under Barrackpore Lok Sabha constituency, which is now represented by Arjun Singh of BJP.

Singh was a four-time TMC legislator and the chairman of Bhatpara municipality since 2010 till March this year. He had switched over to BJP ahead of the Lok Sabha polls and was removed from the post of the municipality chairman in April in a secret ballot after a no confidence motion was passed against him.

But after Singh wrested the Barrackpore parliamentary seat from his old party, he turned the tables on TMC and regained his hold on Bhatpara, which is known to be his bastion.

Following it Sourav Singh, the nephew of Arjun Singh, was elected as the new chairman of the Bhatpara municipality in June this year.

According to state BJP sources, the party is miffed with the return of six municipal bodies to TMC's control. It feels that taking leaders of TMC and other parties without proper background check into its fold had led to the embarrassing situation.

Since the Lok Sabha polls the BJP had taken effective control of seven municipal bodies, including in Naihati, with a majority of the councillors of the civic bodies joining the BJP. However, in the last two months six municipal bodies, except for Bhatpara, have returned to TMC's control.