Kolkata, July 13 (IANS) Three Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) candidates — Sukhendu Sekhar Roy, Sushmita Dev and Prakash Chik Baraik — filed their nominations on Monday for the bypolls to three vacant Rajya Sabha seats from West Bengal, scheduled to be held on July 24.

All three were Trinamool Congress Rajya Sabha members. However, they resigned from the Upper House of Parliament last month before the completion of their respective terms, necessitating bypolls to the three seats.

On the afternoon of July 9, Roy, Dev and Baraik joined the BJP, and a couple of hours later, the party announced their names as its candidates for the Rajya Sabha bypolls.

On Monday, they submitted their nomination papers before the Speaker of the West Bengal Assembly in the presence of Leader of the Opposition Suvendu Adhikari and BJP’s West Bengal unit president and Rajya Sabha member Samik Bhattacharya, among others.

As per the current numerical strength in the West Bengal Assembly, the BJP nominees are expected to win all three seats. The BJP currently has 208 MLAs in the Assembly. To defeat a BJP nominee, an opposition candidate would require at least 70 votes.

Though officially the Trinamool Congress has 80 legislators, 60 of them are with the “rebel but majority” faction led by expelled party legislator Ritabrata Banerjee, while the remaining 20 belong to the “original but minority” faction, which continues to owe allegiance to Mamata Banerjee and her nephew, Abhishek Banerjee.

After Roy, Dev and Baraik joined the BJP and were nominated as the party’s candidates, there was criticism from some old-timers in the saffron camp in West Bengal, who claimed that the move was contrary to the party leadership’s earlier stand that no one from the Trinamool Congress would be allowed to join the BJP.

However, Bhattacharya made it clear that allowing Roy, Dev and Baraik to join the BJP should be viewed as an exceptional case. He said the three leaders had clean track records, with no allegations of corruption during their time in the Trinamool Congress.

–IANS

src/pgh