Siliguri, March 25: Kamtapur Progressive Party chief Atul Roy today did an about-turn and said his outfit would support Trinamul in the presence of minister Gautam Deb in whose constituency the Rajbangshi outfit has a support base.

Roy had said on March 21 at a news conference that the KPP would support BJP candidates throughout north Bengal.

Today, Roy said chief minister Mamata Banerjee had helped Rajbangshis. "During the 34-year Left regime, the Rajbanshi population across north Bengal was deprived of several benefits and hardly any initiative was undertaken for their socio-economic development. However, a lot has changed in the past five years as the Trinamul government has made efforts to carry out development work that benefited Rajbanshis. Also, none other than Mamata Banerjee has announced that the government will recognise the Rajbangshi language after the elections," the KPP president said.

"This decision to recognise the Rajbanshi language in the state is an achievement for us and thus, we have decided to support Trinamul in all the Assembly seats across north Bengal. We will not field candidates in any of these seats and will go to campaign jointly with Trinamul and also individually as a regional political party," he said.

The sources in Trinamul said that yesterday Roy had a closed-door meeting with Deb at the minister's home. "The meeting turned out to be effective. The KPP president after listening in detail from him (Deb) about the state's initiatives, changed his decision and decided to support us," a party source said.

There are about 60 lakh Rajbangshi people in north Bengal, many of them residents of Jalpaiguri district. Dabgram-Fulbari, in Jalpaiguri district, is the seat from where Deb is contesting against the Left-Congress's consensus candidate Dilip Singh of the CPM.

In the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, Trinamul was ahead of the BJP by 4,710 votes in the Dabgram-Fulbari segment. In the coming Assembly election, Deb's prime contender Singh is a known face as the current Siliguri civic chairman. Plus, he has the support of the Congress.

On March 21, while announcing his support for the BJP, Roy had said: "It is only the BJP which has recognised our demands. Even S.S. Ahluwalia, the BJP MP from Darjeeling, has raised our issues in Parliament. On the other hand, the Trinamul government in the state has never listened to our demands in these five years. Even before the chief minister's visit last week, we had spoken to state ministers and Trinamul leaders such as Arup Biswas and Gautam Deb and urged them to fix an appointment with the chief minister during her visit. Even though the chief minister stayed in north Bengal for five days (from March 14 to March 18), we were never called."

Today, the tune had changed. When asked why, Roy said situations keep changing in politics and there is "nothing full and final about it".

He added: "As of now, we don't find any reason to continue as an ally of the BJP. We have spoken to two prominent ministers of the state on the issue and in the course of our discussions, we felt confident that our demand for recognition of the Rajbanshi language would be met."