By IANS,
Bulandshahr (Uttar Pradesh) : Prompted by party veteran Kalyan Singh’s abrupt resignation from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a number of his supporters Friday announced their exit from the party.
Led by lawmaker Sunder Singh, as many as 1,500 BJP activists publicly swore to follow the path taken by Kalyan Singh.
While Sunder Singh was yet to tender his resignation from the membership of the state assembly, his son Shambhoo Singh formally quit the BJP at a rally organised here Friday.
Together with Sunder Singh, Bulandshahr Municipality chairman Sanjay Agarwal too announced his departure from the BJP.
“We are going to strengthen the hands of Kalyan Singhji who was compelled to march out of the party simply because he was humiliated and neglected by the party leadership,” Sanjay Agarwal told the gathering.
And he went on to ask: “When there is no room in the BJP for a devoted and committed leader like Kalyan Singh, then what is the point of our sticking along there?”
While raising anti-BJP slogans, the gathering flayed former MP Ashok Pradhan, against whom Kalyan Singh was busy forming a lobby.
On Tuesday, Kalyan Singh told a press conference in Lucknow: “The BJP leadership has brazenly ignored my demand for denying Pradhan a Lok Sabha ticket from Bulandshahr.”
“Ashok Pradhan had sabotaged not only my son Rajvir Singh’s state assembly election from Bulandshahr in 2007, but he had also engineered the defeat of a couple of other BJP nominees in the region,” he alleged.
Rajvir Singh has since formally switched sides to the Samajwadi Party.