Pratima Bhoumik

Agartala, March 15: First Union Minister of Tripura for social justice and empowerment Pratima Bhoumik is resigned from her membership of the state assembly and retains her position as a member of the union council of ministers.

She handed over her resignation letter to Protem Speaker, Bhushan Das in the Legislative Assembly on Wednesday.

After submitting the resignation, she said that “The result of the election has been announced on 2nd March and I am a member of two posts. It is not possible to hold two memberships at a time. But still remaining as a Union Minister, the party was allowed to stand as a candidate for the Legislative assembly election and was very much proud of this. After the instruction from the party, I resigned from the post of MLA from the Dhanpur constituency. I would like to thank not only the people of Dhanpur but every individual in the state. Whatever promises we made to the people of Dhanpur, I will do all of them for the people of the constituency.”

In the just-concluded assembly elections in the state, she got elected from her native Dhanpur assembly constituency by a comfortable margin against CPI (M) candidate Kaushik Chanda. She was also tipped as a chief ministerial candidate but the central BJP leadership, particularly union home minister Amit Shah and BJP’s national president J.P. Nadda ruled in favour of Dr. Manik Saha as chief minister.

In fact, during the campaign for elections, Amit Shah had clearly projected Dr. Manik Saha as the chief ministerial face of the BJP.

However, Pratima’s expected relinquishment of the assembly membership will reduce BJP’s strength of legislative representation from the present 32 to 31 which will remain the same in case another candidate is elected from Dhanpur.