Ram Madhav dubs Sikkim CM Pawan Chamling's party 'Sikkim Dictatorial Front'

Gangtok: BJP national general secretary Ram Madhav on Monday jibed Sikkim chief minister Pawan Kumar Chamling by calling his SDF party a “Sikkim Dictatorial Front”. He said the BJP and regional parties would offer a stronger alternative after the assembly elections due in 2019. “The Sikkim Democratic Front is not democratic at all, it is democratic for the sake of name only,” he told reporters at the state BJP office in Singtam Bazar, about 30 kilometres from Gangtok. [caption id=“attachment_2562922” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] File image of Ram Madhav. CNN-News 18[/caption] “The SDF is Sikkim Dictatorial Front actually,” Madhav said as he charged Chamling’s party with terrorising the opposition in the state and preventing the creation of a strong alternative to his government. The senior BJP leader, who is the party’s in-charge of Jammu and Kashmir and the northeast, decried a lack of good governance in the state and said the BJP and other “like-minded” regional parties have decided to come forward to change the situation in the state. “We have found good governance lacking in Sikkim… There is a lot of corruption and development is also lacking,” he said, adding that the BJP wants democratic parties to come together in Sikkim to offer an alternative to the ruling SDF. Former minister Balbir Subba and former Gangtok mayor KN Topgey and a number of political activists joined the BJP in Madhav’s presence. Earlier in the day, Madhav held a closed-door meeting with Chief Minister Chamling’s younger brother and independent MLA RN Chamling at a hotel. They were said to have discussed a strategy to break the SDF’s hegemony in Sikkim since 1993. RN Chamling had won as an independent candidate from the Rangrang-Yangyang assembly seat in south Sikkim in a bypoll in 2014 after the chief minister vacated the seat upon winning from two constituencies. Chamling’s brother nurses chief ministerial ambitions and may seek the BJP’s support to send his elder brother packing from the chief minister’s post after the 2019 assembly polls, according to political commentators.