Kolkata, May 12: Experienced leader and six-time MLA Taapsee Roy will take the oath as the Acting Speaker of the West Bengal Assembly on Tuesday. Governor R.N. Ravi will administer the oath to Roy.
As Acting Speaker, Taapsee Roy will oversee the oath-taking ceremony for the newly elected 293 MLAs on May 13 and 14, following the recently concluded West Bengal Assembly elections.
The Acting Speaker is a temporary presiding officer appointed for a limited period before the election of a regular Speaker for the newly elected Lok Sabha or state assembly. Typically, they are the most senior members of the house and supervise the swearing-in ceremony for new members.
Taapsee Roy is the most senior MLA among the 207 current members of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has formed its first government in West Bengal since independence after this assembly election.
Insiders from the state unit of the BJP have indicated that Roy may also be in line to become the party’s Speaker in the assembly.
The total number of seats in the West Bengal Assembly is 294; however, there are currently 293 MLAs. This is due to the Election Commission of India (ECI) deciding to conduct re-elections in the Falta assembly constituency of South 24 Parganas on April 29, following widespread electoral malpractice. The re-election for Falta will take place on May 21, with results announced on May 24.
Taapsee Roy’s journey as an elected MLA began in 1996 when he was first elected as a Congress MLA from the Vidyasagar constituency before the delimitation. He was re-elected in 2001 from the Bara Bazaar constituency, another area prior to delimitation in South Kolkata. Roy was re-elected from the Baranagar constituency on a Trinamool ticket.
He was nominated as the BJP candidate for the Kolkata (North) Lok Sabha seat in 2024 but lost to four-time Trinamool Congress MP Sudip Bandopadhyay. This year, he contested from the Maniktala assembly constituency in North Kolkata as a BJP candidate and won by defeating Trinamool Congress’s Shreya Pandey by over 125,000 votes.
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SK/AS
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