Ripun Bora, the former president of the Assam Congress, joined the All India Trinamool Congress on Sunday in Kolkata, becoming the latest Assamese official to defect from the grand old party.
Ripun Bora, the former president of the Assam Congress, joined the Trinamool Congress in the presence of the party’s national general secretary, Abhishek Banerjee.
Sushmita Dev, who joined Mamata Banerjee’s party in August last year, preceded Bora in joining the TMC.
“From today I have started my new political journey!” Bora shared his resignation letter to Congress President Sonia Gandhi on Twitter on Sunday evening.
A tweet from the official Trinamool Congress handle said: “Delighted to welcome Shri@ripunbora, Former Minister of Panchayat & Rural Development, Minister of Education in Assam, former Rajya Sabha MP & former President of Assam Pradesh Congress committee! He joined us today in the presence of Shri @abhishekaitc.”
Moreover, Ripun Bora, who ran as a joint Opposition candidate in the recent Rajya Sabha election in Assam, lost his seat.
Meanwhile, Bora’s loss was controversial, given that the Opposition had the numbers, and it sparked a battle of words between the Opposition parties (Congress and AIUDF), with each accusing the other of “cross-voting.”
“Instead of fighting aggressively and unitedly to prevent BJP at this critical juncture of the country, the leader of this grand old Congress party at different levels are fighting each other for their vested interest,” Bora wrote in the letter.
Mr Ripun Bora, who had been a member of the Congress since 1976, claimed in his resignation letter to Sonia Gandhi that a group of Congress leaders in Assam had been in contact with ruling BJP leaders and Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma.
He further said that it was an “open secret” that a group of Assam Congress top leaders were “maintaining covert understandings with the BJP Government, primarily with the Chief Minister.”
Ripun Bora involved in Congress since his School days
Ripun Bora, a former minister in the Tarun Gogoi government, has been involved with the Congress since his school days, officially joining the party in 1976. He was elected to the Rajya Sabha from the state in 2016. After Congress lost in Assam in 2016, he was appointed head of the state unit to help the party recover.
When Congress was defeated in the 2021 elections, Bora resigned as party chairman, accepting “moral responsibility” for the party’s poor electoral performance.
Debabrata Saikia condemned Bora’s resignation
Bora’s resignation was condemned by Debabrata Saikia, the Leader of the Opposition in the Assam Assembly, as a “move for his own self-interest.” “He quit because he sought a Rajya Sabha seat,” Saikia claimed.
MP Pradyut Bordoloi and Congress leader said the party has handed Bora “a lot of leverage.” “There were a lot of others who applied for the RS seat, but we awarded it to him,” Bordoloi remarked.
In addition, Saikia said, “Whether there was infighting or not, Congress stood 100 per cent behind him during the recent polls.”
In response to the claims, TMC’s Dev remarked that rather than “throwing them under the bus,” Congress should look into why leaders were leaving the party.
“It’s easy to label Ripun Bora a traitor, but one must consider what people are thinking and doing when they quit,” she said, adding that leaders saw the Congress as having “little future.”
“The party should have battled tooth and nail in the recent Rajya Sabha polls, putting up a united front, because Bora was the party’s last man standing in the Northeast for the Rajya Sabha —but they lost, despite having the numbers,” she said.
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