Minority face of Trinamool Abdul Karim Chowdhary turns rebel, to skip crucial party meeting today.
Veteran minority face of Trinamool Congress and 11-time elected MLA from Islampur Assembly constituency in West Bengal’s North Dinajpur district since 1967, Abdul Karim Chowdhary, seems to have turned rebel.
Friday’s meeting of the party was organized at Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee‘s residence in south Kolkata and was important on multiple counts considering the crisis faced by the party. Party sources said that one important agenda of the meeting will be the recently concluded by-polls in Sagardighi Assembly constituency in Murshidabad district, which Trinamool Congress lost to Congress by a margin of over 20,000 votes.
Sagardighi being a thoroughly minority-dominated constituency and a traditional Trinamool Congress stronghold, the results have kept the party leadership concerned, considering it as a signal of the beginning of the erosion in its dedicated minority vote bank.
Another important agenda of the meeting will be Birbhum district and how the party’s organization there would operate for the panchayat polls in absence of its district president Anubrata Mondal, who is currently in Enforcement Directorate (ED) custody in New Delhi for his alleged involvement in the cattle smuggling scam.
The third important agenda, according to sources, was how to counter the charges of corruption, especially as regards to the multi-crore teachers’ recruitment irregularities scam in which several party leaders, including the former state education minister and Trinamool Congress secretary general Partha Chatterjee, are currently in judicial custody.
Despite the importance of the meeting, he choose to skip it at Kolkata on Friday afternoon to be chaired by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee to finalize the strategy for the forthcoming polls for the three-tier panchayat system in the state.
In recent times, Chowdhary had even threatened to quit as a party MLA. However, he changed his mind the very next day saying he would continue to be in Trinamool Congress but as a rebel legislator.
Grievances of Abdul Karim Chowdhary
Chowdhary has apparently been upset because he publicly demanded that Agarwal should be removed from the post of party’s district president as the latter was allegedly the main person to instigate infighting within the party in the district.
Earlier on, Chowdhary also did not attend a meeting of the North Dinajpur district core committee meeting on Wednesday which was convened by the party’s district president Kanaia Lal Agarwal, with whom Chowdhary’s disagreements erupted a number of times in the recent past.
He decided to skip the crucial meeting of the party at Kolkata on Friday afternoon to be chaired by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee to finalise the strategy for the forthcoming polls for the three-tier panchayat system in the state.
He indicated that the meeting would be fruitless as they would not be allowed to speak and said that the high- command would only give instructions. He said, “The main agenda of the meeting is the forthcoming panchayat polls. The party high- command will give instructions there. There is no scope to say anything. So, I will not be attending the meeting,” Chowdhary said.
Abdul Karim Chowdhury
Abdul Karim Chowdhury, an Indian politician from West Bengal was also was the past Minister for Mass Education Extension and Library Services in the Government of the state. He was also an MLA, elected from the Islampur constituency in the 2011 West Bengal state assembly election. Before this term he had been elected for 10 terms as MLA. He is one of the veteran leaders of West Bengal and vice presidents of All India Trinamool Congress West Bengal unit.