Tathagata Roy fumes on Twitter, blames BJP state leadership for bypolls fiasco in West Bengal

Former governor of Meghalaya, Tathagata Roy, who is often in the news for his controversial comments, has done it again. Following the Trinamool Congress’ resounding win in the bypolls to four Assembly constituencies in West Bengal on Tuesday, Roy took to Twitter to slam the Bharatiya Janata Party. He tweeted:

দল দালালদের জন্য কোল পেতে দিয়েছিল। গলবস্ত্র হয়ে তাদের এনেছিল। যারা আদর্শের জন্য বিজেপি করত তাদের বলা হয়েছিল, এতবছর ধরে কি করেছেন, ছিঁ..ছেন ? আমরা আঠারোটা সিট এনেছি। জুলিয়াস সিজারের মতো Vini Vidi Vici। এখন ভাঁড়ামো করলে হবে ?
আজকে বিজেপির শোচনীয় পরিণতি এই সবের জন্যই। https://t.co/33JiAjwkvf

— Tathagata Roy (@tathagata2) November 2, 2021

The tweet in Bengali roughly translated “They had welcomed the pimps with open arms and humility. Those who worked for the BJP ideology were asked, what have you done for so many years? We brought 18 seats. Vini Vidi Vici like Julius Caesar. There is no point in behaving like fools. It is because of such actions that the BJP is in such a plight.” Although the unfortunate poll results led to the comment, Roy’s remark was also targeted specifically against the former BJP president of West Bengal Dilip Ghosh, who had posted a creative on his handle stating that several “dalal” or pimps had joined the party during the Assembly elections in the state and many of them left after the results were announced, but the remaining few are still creating trouble. Ghosh’s poster was directed towards a large number of prominent Trinamool Congress politicians who had jumped ships ahead of the eight-phase West Bengal Assembly elections. Many of them, including Mukul Roy and Rajib Banerjee, more recently, have returned to the TMC fold. Roy on Tuesday used the poster as an excuse to slam the BJP, squarely blaming them for the plight of the party in the state. He said that the very people Ghosh is calling pimps were welcomed obsequiously into the party while the dedication and the hard work of the old party workers were ignored. Roy mockingly draws an analogy between the BJP and Julius Caesar who used the phrase Veni, vidi, vici in a letter to the Roman Senate around 47 BC after he had achieved a quick victory in his short war against Pharnaces II of Pontus at the Battle of Zela, indicating that the BJP justified its actions on the basis of having won 18 seats out of the 42 Bengal Lok Sabha seats in 2019. Meanwhile, TMC’s Sovandeb Chattopadhyay has won the Khardaha assembly seat by a margin of over 93,000 votes, whereas in Dinhata constituency, TMC’s Udayan Guha won by a margin of over 1.6 lakh votes. In Dinhata, BJP’s Shok Mandal secured 25,387 votes, while TMC’s Udayan Guha secured 1,89,153 votes. In Khardaha, TMC won with 1,13,647 votes, whereas BJP has secured only 20,198 votes. Moreover, the TMC is also leading in Gosaba and Santipur constituencies with 1,60,231 votes and 1,10,907 votes, respectively. Days after losing the West Bengal polls to the ruling Trinamool Congress, Roy in a series of tweets had put the blame on ‘KDSA’, BJP’s top leadership of Bengal (BJP national general secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya, state party chief Dilip Ghosh, national joint general secretary (organization) Shiv Prakash and national secretary Arvind Menon). Soon after BJP’s drubbing in the West Bengal Assembly elections, Roy had said that he wanted to present a report on the party’s loss. He had alleged that tickets were given “while sitting in Hastings and 7-star hotels to incoming garbage from TMC”. He also reacted sharply against leaders for not coming to aid of the “ideologically driven workers or devout swayamsevaks working for the party since the 1980s and facing persecution at that hands of Trinamoolis”. With input from agencies