BJP's Tathagata Roy 'bids farewell' to Bengal unit 'for time being'

Senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader Tathagata Roy, who has been lashing out at the party's West Bengal leadership since the assembly poll debacle, on Saturday said he has decided to bid 'farewell' to the state unit of the saffron camp for the time being, apparently indicating that he would stop criticism of its leaders.

Roy said he would wait to see the municipal poll results in Bengal.

According to sources close to him, the term 'farewell' doesn't mean that he is leaving the party.

Roy was trying to say that he would stop attacking the state leadership for the time being as his criticism led to an embarrassment to the party, the sources said.

Earlier this week, the former governor of Meghalaya had said the party would become extinct if the state unit did not mend its ways.

'I was not writing on Twitter to get applause from people. I was doing this to make the party aware of the fact that some leaders got swayed by women and wealth. Now only results will speak. I will wait for the results of the municipal polls. Farewell, for now, West Bengal BJP!' Roy said on the microblogging site on Saturday.

State BJP leaders declined to comment on the development.

'BJP's well-wishers pointed out that I should make complaints about money and women within the party and not publicly. I politely tell them that the time has passed. The BJP can do whatever it wants to me. But if they do not radically reform their way of functioning, the extinction of the party in West Bengal is inevitable,' Roy tweeted earlier this week.

Roy had asserted that he would continue to play the role of his party's 'conscience-keeper' after BJP national vice-president Dilip Ghosh told him that he was free to leave the camp if he was "upset and ashamed" over its style of functioning.

Roy had recently been critical of the decisions taken by BJP's West Bengal minder Kailash Vijayvargiya, Ghosh, and senior leaders Arvind Menon and Shiv Prakash, ahead of March-April assembly polls, and blamed them in a series of tweets for the saffron camp's poor show in the last assembly elections.

The BJP won only 77 seats of the 294-member West Bengal assembly in the last elections.