'Feel suffocated': TMC's Dinesh Trivedi quits Rajya Sabha in a jolt ahead of West Bengal Assembly polls

Trinamool Congress MP Dinesh Trivedi announced his resignation from the Rajya Sabha on Friday saying he feels suffocated in the House as he is unable to do anything for the violence going on in his state of West Bengal. “If you sit here quietly and cannot do anything, then it is better that you resign from here and go to the land of Bengal and be with people,” he said in the Upper House of Parliament. Trivedi said the world looks at India when something happens. “What I mean to say is the way violence is taking place in our state. Sitting here, I am feeling perplexed as to what should I do,” he added. The TMC MP said he is unable to bear various incidents that are happening in West Bengal. “I am grateful to my party that it has sent me here, but now I feel a little suffocated. We are unable to do anything and there is atrocity (going on). My voice of conscience is saying what Swami Vivekananda used to say - arise, awake and stop not till the goal is reached,” Trivedi said while announcing his resignation from the House, in a jolt to the TMC ahead of the Assembly elections in West Bengal. Rajya Sabha Deputy Chairman Harivansh Narayan Singh said there is a due process for resigning from the House and asked Trivedi to submit his resignation in writing to the chairman. Meanwhile, BJP West Bengal in-charge general secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya welcomed Trivedi’s move saying Trivedi was welcome to join the BJP in case he wanted to do so. Vijayvargiya said many more TMC leaders were feeling claustrophobic in the Mamata-led “dynastic dispensation”. The former railway minister has been with the TMC since the party was formed in 1998 and became its first general secretary. He had joined the Janata Dal in 1990, a few years after working with the Congress party. He was the Union Minister for Railways and Union Minister for State for Health and Family Welfare, a member of parliament from Barrackpore, and then a member of the Rajya Sabha. He was a member of the Upper House of the Parliament from 1990 till 1996 from Gujarat as a Janata Dal candidate and from 2002 to 2008 from West Bengal as a TMC candidate. Recently, he lost the 2019 Lok Sabha elections from Barrackpore to TMC MLA turned BJP candidate Arjun Singh. In March 2012, he was made to resign as a Union Railway Minister by party chief Mamata Banerjee. Banerjee was reportedly upset with Trivedi over his plan to hike train fares announced in the rail budget. Trivedi had not consulted the Trinamool Congress over the Budget, according to a News18 report. Trivedi is a prominent face of the TMC to reach out to non-Bengali voters who constitute a huge section of Kolkata and North 24 Parganas’ population.