Englishbazar Municipality in Malda has constituted a full civic board under the BJP after inducting four former Trinamool Congress councillors who had resigned from the party and declared themselves Independents. The new board retains Sumala Agarwala as vice-chairperson and includes six members of the chairman-in-council.
Municipal chairman and BJP MLA Amlan Bhaduri issued a notification on Friday announcing the formation of the full board. Agarwala, the councillor from ward 2, will continue as vice-chairperson, a position she held under the previous Trinamool-led board.
Four of the six members inducted into the chairman-in-council are former Trinamool councillors who now identify as Independents. They are Agarwala, Subhamay Basu, Uday Choudhury, Poly Sarkar and Prasenjit Ghosh. The remaining two members are BJP councillors Sutapa Mukherjee and Krishna Nath.
The board’s formation follows a change in the municipality’s political leadership. On October 7, Agarwala and 10 other Trinamool councillors announced that they were leaving the party and would be treated as Independents. On the same day, Bhaduri, one of the municipality’s three BJP councillors, was elected chairman.
The transition came after Krishnendu Narayan Choudhury resigned as chairman of the Trinamool-led board in September, following the BJP’s return to power in the state. The latest notification formalises the distribution of responsibilities within the municipality and gives the BJP control of the civic administration through a board that includes defectors from the former ruling group.
The numbers from the 2022 municipal election show the scale of the political shift. The BJP had won three of Englishbazar’s 29 wards, while the Trinamool Congress had secured 25 seats and an Independent had won one. The new board therefore reflects a change in municipal control driven by subsequent political realignment rather than the original ward-level election result.
The notification names the chairman-in-council members but the report does not specify the portfolios assigned to each member. It also does not provide details of any changes planned for municipal services or administration. For now, the immediate administrative development is the constitution of the full board under Bhaduri, with Agarwala retained as vice-chairperson and the six-member council formally notified.
