GUWAHATI: After a year since he had quit the BJP, former Assam MP Ram Prasad Sarmah joined the Congress on Monday.
Accompanied by three-time former Assam Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi, Sarma met Congress leader KC Venugopal in New Delhi prior to joining the grand old party. He will formally join the Congress in Guwahati on March 1.
Cornered in the BJP after being caught in a conflict between old leaders and new leaders, he had resigned from the party. He was denied ticket to contest the 2019 Lok Sabha elections from his constituency Tezpur where the BJP fielded Pallab Lochan Das who had defected from the Congress.
“The BJP in Assam has been reduced to the B team of the Congress. So, I thought I should be with the Congress’s A team,” Sarmah told this newspaper from New Delhi.
He was confident that the Congress would return to power in Assam next year when the Assembly elections will be held.
“We had built the BJP in Assam brick by brick. However, some people, who came from other parties and became ministers, destroyed it. They don’t follow the ideals and philosophy of the RSS, Shyamaprasad Mukherjee, Deendayal Upadhyaya, Atal Behari Vajpayee, LK Advani etc,” Sarmah said without taking the name of any new BJP leader.
He lamented that the party’s founder leaders in Assam such as former MPs Ramen Deka, Rajen Gohain, Bijoya Chakraborty and himself besides some six lakh old grassroots workers were ignored by the new leaders.