Indian cricketer Manoj Tiwary joined the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal on Wednesday, 24 February.
On Tuesday, The Quint had reported that Tiwary, a former captain of the Bengal cricket team, will be joining the ruling dispensation in the state, at a rally by party supremo and Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, in Hooghly's Chinsurah.
Tiwary joined the party at the rally along with other eminent personalities.
Tiwary took to Twitter on Wednesday morning to make the announcement. He shared his new Instagram page for party activities, marking his "new journey".
"A new journey begins from today. Need all your love & support. From now onwards this will be my political profile on Instagram," said Tiwary in his tweet.
Tiwary has represented India in the one-day international (ODI) and T20 formats. He has also played for the Kolkata Knight Riders, Kings XI Punjab, and Rising Pune Supergiants in the Indian Premier League.
Sources in the Trinamool told The Quint earlier that the party approached Tiwary about four weeks ago as they saw him as a suitable "celebrity" replacement to cricketer Laxmi Ratan Shukla. Shukla was the party's district president in Howrah and recently quit both, from the party and as minister in the Bengal government, to "focus on sports."
Shukla had further announced that he would be quitting politics altogether. However, sources in the Trinamool had said at the time that he fell victim to the party's internal factionalism in the district.
After meetings with Prashant Kishor's Indian Political Action Committee (I-PAC), which is handling the TMC's campaign for the upcoming West Bengal Assembly elections, Tiwary met Mamata Banerjee herself to seal the deal.
The party, however, may not field him from Shukla's Howrah (Uttar) constituency, but from an adjacent constituency in the same district.
Tiwary's joining will be latest in a slew of celebrity joining and defections in both the incumbent Trinamool Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), ahead of the Bengal polls scheduled for April-May.
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