Kolkata: Once a top-runner in Bharatiya Janata Party's chief ministerial candidate race, state chief Dilip Ghosh announced that he will not be contesting the upcoming polls. The announcement comes as a noteworthy move by the saffron party which is touted to be one of the prime competitors of ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) in Bengal.
While exclusively speaking to ABP News, Ghosh said: "I am not contesting the upcoming West Bengal Assembly elections."
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Speculations were rife that Ghosh along with BJP's national vice-president Mukul Roy will contest Bengal polls. However, there has been no official annoucement by the BJP on the issue.
It is also being expected that BJP might release its partial list of candidates for Bengal Assembly Elections on Thursday.
Meanwhile, the BJP's senior leadership is reportedly in a soup over selection of candidates in West Bengal as several party leaders, workers staged protests outside the BJP state headquarters on Tuesday demanding changes in the candidate list declared by the party's Central Election Committee (CEC).
However, the party dubbed the incident of protests outside the party office as "some kind of conspiracy" by the opposition.
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With an aim to topple the Mamata Banerjee-led government in Bengal, the BJP has also fielded both its Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha MPs such as Locket Chatterjee, Babul Supriyo and Swapan Dasgupta from various assembly seats in the poll-bound state.
Earlier in the day, TMC unveiled a "development-oriented" election manifesto for the upcoming assembly polls in West Bengal, promising an income scheme for all families, a student credit card and constitution of a task force to examine the inclusion of several communities under the OBC category.
(With inputs from Kuntal Chakraborty)