Former Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay joined the Bharatiya Janata Party in Kolkata on Thursday, two days after he resigned as a Calcutta High Court judge, ANI reported.

Gangopadhyay was inducted into the BJP in the presence of the party’s West Bengal chief Sukanta Majumdar and Leader of Opposition Suvendu Adhikari.

“I believe the way he [Gangopadhyay] has worked as a justice for the deprived, exploited victims of Bengal, he will carry forward that work with the leadership of the BJP,” Majumdar said, welcoming the former High Court judge to the “family of [Prime Minister] Narendra Modi”.

On Tuesday, just hours after resigning as a judge of the Calcutta High Court, Gangopadhyay announced that he will join the BJP on Thursday.

Gangopadhyay had announced his decision to quit the judiciary and join politics on Sunday.

Responding to Gangopadhyay’s announcement, Debangshu Bhattacharya, the spokesperson of the state’s ruling Trinamool Congress, said on Sunday that his party has “been saying for long that he is a political party worker”.

Gangopadhyay had recently accused a fellow judge in the Calcutta High Court of acting in the interest of a political party in West Bengal.

On January 24, Gangopadhyay had ordered an inquiry by the Central Bureau of Investigation into alleged irregularities in admissions to state-run medical colleges in West Bengal, even though the petitioner had not made such a demand.

Later that day, the state’s Trinamool Congress government moved a division bench of Justices Soumen Sen and Uday Kumar, which stayed Gangopadhyay’s order. However, on the same afternoon, Gangopadhyay allowed the documents of the case to be handed over to the central law enforcement agency.

On January 25, Gangopadhyay passed another directive stating that the division bench’s stay order should be ignored, even though legal precedent requires a single-judge bench to comply with the orders of a larger bench.

Gangopadhyay also accused Sen of being an “interested party” in the case.

On January 29, the Supreme Court transferred to itself all proceedings related to the matter.

Gangopadhyay was appointed as an additional judge in the Calcutta High Court in 2018 and was made a permanent judge in 2020.

In the past two years, he has ordered investigations by central agencies into several cases of alleged irregularities in the job recruitment process of the state education department as well as in the recruitment processes of civic bodies.

Also read: Why a Calcutta High Court judge joining BJP has raised questions about judicial independence