Denied ticket, sitting Tezpur MP Ram Prasad Sarmah takes up law practice again

GUWAHATI: After being benched from contesting the

Lok Sabha polls

, Tezpur parliamentary constituency’s sitting BJP MP, Ram Prasad Sarmah resumed his profession as advocate of Gauhati High Court on Monday after a gap of five years.

“The pension that I will get after my tenure as MP is over will not be sufficient to support the social and philanthropic works that I am engaged in currently. So I decided to resume my procession as an advocate after five years. Today is the first day I came to the court,” Sarmah said.

He said he had also filed a case for a client at a fee of Rs 11 on the first day. “The client was poor, so I thought I should take only a nominal fee,” Sarmah said, while asserting that from now on he will continue to be in politics and his legal profession together. “I am very much in politics. At the same time I will continue with my legal profession. I stopped practising law in the last five years when I became an MP,” Sarmah said, adding that his resignation was not accepted by the party.

Sarmah submitted his resignation after he was

denied ticket

for seeking re-election from the Tezpur seat that went to the polls in the first phase on April 11. Later, he also announced that he would be on a mission mode to reconstitute the state BJP after May 23, when the

Lok Sabha election

results are out, by taking along the old guard who worked for decades for the growth of the saffron party in the state. “As my resignation was not accepted, I am still a BJP member. I will also vote for the BJP candidate from Gauhati Lok Sabha seat, Queen Ojha. I am preparing for the 2021 assembly polls,” said Sarmah, who had charged the state BJP leaders of not including his name in the list of probable candidates submitted to the central leaders last month.

State BJP president Ranjeet Kumar Dass denied the charge, saying that Sarmah’s name was very much there in the list sent by the party to the BJP central leaders. “We have to bring back the ideology of stalwarts like Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, Deendayal Upadhaya, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and L K Advani. We, as BJP members who have spent four decades for the party, cannot allow BJP to become rudderless. RSS is the sun, and we as planets have to revolve around it,” said Sarmah.