Bringing an end to the long-running speculations looming over his political career, ex-TMC leader Suvendu Adhikari joined BJP as he took up the saffron flag from the hands of Amit Shah.

Adhikari was introduced to BJP to a thunderous applaud from the huge crowd present at Shah’s rally in Midnapore collegiate ground.

Adhikari, the former Minister of Transport, Irrigation and Water resource in Government of West Bengal, has taken with him a total of more than 40 TMC leaders to the BJP.

Nine MLAs – six from TMC, one from CPIM, one from CPI and one from Congress – joined BJP on Saturday. One sitting and a former TMC MP also defected to the Hindutva camp.

Following are the names of nine legislators who will change loyalty:

1. Banasree Maity- Contai North MLA (TMC)

2. Tapasi Mondal – Haldiya Purba MLA (CPIM)

3. Ashok Dinda – Tamluk MLA (CPI)

4. Sudip Mukherjee – Purulia (Congress)

5. Biswajit Kundu – Kalna (TMC)

6. Saikat Panja – Burdwan Purba (TMC)

7. Shilbhadra Dutta – Barrackpore (TMC)

8. Dipali Biswas – Gajol, Maldah (TMC)

9. Sukra Munda – Nagarkata, Jalpaiguri (TMC)

As it was expected, TMC’s Burdwan Purba MP Sunil Mondal kept his allegiance with Adhikari and followed him to Narendra Modi’s party.

Ex-parliamentarian Shyama Prasad Mukherjee also travelled to the venue of Midnapore’s mega rally from the guest house in Kolaghat, where all the defecting TMC leaders were camped on Saturday.

Apart from the above-mentioned elected leaders, some prominent TMC leaders who followed suit with Adhikari are Col. Diptangshu Chaudhury, Alipurduar’s Ashish Dutta and Bappa Majumdar, Uttar Dinajpur’s Kartik Pal and Prafulla Barman, former MLAs in Dakshin Dinajpur Satyen Ray and Debashis Majumdar, among others.

One of the architects of TMC’s Nandigram revolution and the party’s path to power in 2011, the 50-year-old Adhikari was a major force of the party’s ground-level organisation in the state and has his loyalists in almost every district in Bengal.

His departure is likely to prove fateful for TMC. But the West Bengal’s governing party has maintained that the recent development will not cause much damage to its chances of retaining power in the 2021 Assembly polls.