NDA presidential nominee Draupadi Murmu will meet BJP MPs and MLAs from West Bengal on Tuesday to seek their support for the July 18 poll to elect the first person in the country. Murmu is visiting various states to garner support from lawmakers. She will arrive in Kolkata around 7 PM on Monday, BJP sources said.
"In the morning of July 12, she will first visit the ancestral house of Swami Vivekananda in the city, following which she will meet BJP lawmakers at a hotel around 10 AM," a BJP leader said. Murmu was scheduled to visit Kolkata on July 9, but it was canceled in the wake of the one-day national mourning as a mark of respect to former Japanese premier Shinzo Abe. Abe, 67, the longest-serving prime minister of Japan, was assassinated on July 8 in the west Japanese town of Nara while he was campaigning for his party.
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West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee had recently said that Murmu, a tribal BJP leader from Odisha, could have been a consensus candidate had the saffron party discussed with the opposition parties before fielding her. Non-BJP parties, including the Congress and TMC, have named former Union minister Yashwant Sinha as the joint nominee in the presidential election.
The BJP presently has 17 Lok Sabha MPs from West Bengal. Of them, a BJP MP, Arjun Singh, has switched over to the TMC but is yet to resign as a parliamentarian. The saffron camp has 75 MLAs in the state assembly. However, five of them have switched over to the TMC but they are yet to resign as legislators.
