No political development at the moment: Ganguly brushes aside rumours of joining BJP

PTI, Oct 16, 2019, 9:48 AM IST

Kolkata: BCCI president-elect Sourav Ganguly Tuesday brushed aside speculations that he would join the saffron camp and said it would not happen “at the moment” as neither he nor Union home minister Amit Shah had any discussion about it during their recent meeting.

Shah had met Ganguly on Saturday triggering speculations that the former Indian cricket captain had been offered the BCCI presidents post in return for which he would contest the crucial West Bengal assembly elections in 2021 as a BJP candidate.

Ganguly, who is the president of Cricket Association of Bengal (CAB), had on Monday pipped former India batsman Brijesh Patel. He emerged as the lone contender in the race for the BCCI presidentship as he was the only one to have filed the nomination for world cricket’s most-coveted post.

“I’ve heard these political questions before too when I met Mamata didi, the chief minister of West Bengal,” Ganguly told reporters at CAB.

“I met Amit Shah for the first time. Neither was I asked a question on what’s going to happen to BCCI, whether I’m going to get a post or not. Nor was there any discussion of the sort that ‘you (meaning himself) get this (BCCI presidentship) only if you agree to that’. So there’s no of political development at the moment,” he said.

Shah’s son Jay Shah will be the new secretary of BCCI and Arun Dhumal will be the new treasurer.

Dhumal is the younger brother of MoS Finance and former BCCI president Anurag Thakur.

On Monday West Bengal BJP president Dilip Ghosh had said that if Ganguly joins politics “politics will prosper”.

“Gautam Gambhir has joined BJP. The doors of BJP are open for everybody,” he had said.

Parties cutting across political lines in West Bengal on Monday congratulated former Team India captain Sourav Ganguly after he emerged as the consensus candidate for the post of BCCI president.