National Democratic Alliance (NDA) presidential candidate Droupadi Murmu will meet BJP legislators from West Bengal tomorrow (July 12) to seek their support for the July 18 poll to elect the president of India.

Murmu is visiting several states to garner support and solidarity from MPs and MLAs. According to BJP sources, Murmu would arrive in Kolkata today around 7 PM. The BJP leader stated, "On July 12, she will first visit the city's Swami Vivekananda ancestral home, after which she would meet BJP parliamentarians at a hotel around 10 AM."

Murmu was scheduled to visit Kolkata on July 9, but it was postponed in the wake of the one-day national mourning as a mark of respect to former Japanese premier Shinzo Abe. The longest-serving Japanese prime minister, Abe, 67, was killed on July 8 in the western town of Nara while running for office.

Mamata Banerjee, the chief minister of West Bengal, recently said that Murmu, an Odisha-based tribal BJP leader, could have been a consensus candidate if the saffron party had talked to the opposition parties first before putting her up. Former Union minister Yashwant Sinha is the joint presidential candidate of non-BJP parties including the Congress and TMC.

There are now 17 West Bengali MPs for the BJP in the Lok Sabha. One of them, Arjun Singh, a BJP member of parliament, has joined the TMC but has not yet submitted his resignation.

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