Tomorrow cricketer Manoj Tiwari will join TMC in Mamta’s rally: sources

Indian cricketer Manoj Tiwari will join TMC in West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s rally in Hooghly district on 24 February. Sources associated with the party have given this information to Uniquenewsonline.

Along with Manoj Tiwari, some members of Congress and BJP and the rest of the “eminent people” are also expected to join the party during the rally. Banerjee’s rally will take place on the same ground where Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed a public meeting on 22 February. TMC’s rally is being seen as a response to PM Modi’s rally.

Manoj Tiwari, 35, has represented the Indian cricket team in ODI and T20 formats. He has also played for Kolkata Knight Riders, Kings XI Punjab and Rising Pune in the IPL.

TMC sources told Quint that the party had approached Tiwari about four weeks ago as they saw him as a suitable “celebrity” as a replacement for cricketer Laxmi Ratan Shukla. Shukla was the party’s district president in Howrah, having recently left both the party and the ministerial posts in the Bengal government to “focus on sports”.

After a meeting with election strategist Prashant Kishore with the I-PAC, which is handling TMC’s campaign for the upcoming West Bengal assembly elections, Tiwari himself met Mamata Banerjee to seal the deal.

However, it may be that the party fielded him not from the Howrah (North) constituency of Shukla, but from a nearby constituency in the same district.