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Patna : Dissident BJP leader and former Union minister Yashwant Sinha, 80, on April 21, 2018, announced he was quitting his party and party politics. Sinha said he would now work on ‘saving democracy’ in the country and would not join any other political party. Sinha said he was taking ‘Sanyas’ (retirement) from party politics. “I am not going to be a member of any other political party,” Sinha announced at a meeting here adding he would launch a strong movement to ‘save democracy’ in the country.

A vocal critic of the BJP leadership and the government, Sinha alleged that there was a “threat” to democracy under the present dispensation. “I have had a long association with the BJP. Today I am severing my ties with the BJP,” Sinha said. The meeting was attended by opposition leaders from the Congress and the RJD besides dissident BJP leader and Patna Sahib MP Shatrughan Sinha.

Yashwant Sinha, a former bureaucrat, held finance finance and external affairs portfolios in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government but was sidelined after Narendra Modi and Amit Shah came at the helm. He has been publicly opposing the Modi government’s economic policies and style of functioning. The meeting was hosted by Rashtriya Manch (National Forum) that Sinha had formed on January 30, 2018, as an apolitical forum.

Sinha had joined the BJP in the early 1990’s after a split in the Janata Dal and became its national spokesperson in June 1996. He did not contest 2014 LS polls. His son Jayant Sinha, a Union Minister, had won from Hazaribagh in Jharkhand. Yashwant Sinha joined politics in 1984 after resigning from IAS.

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