Former national team and Mohun Bagan football star Mehtab Hossain joined the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Tuesday, only to announce publicly in less than 24 hours that he wouldn\u2019t like to be part of mainstream politics.<\/p>\n
Mehtab Hossain \u2013 with a BJP flag handed over to him by the party\u2019s West Bengal chief Dilip Ghosh \u2013 had said on Tuesday that joining politics was the best way to help those who are in difficulties.<\/p>\n
However, on Wednesday morning, he wrote on his Facebook account that he had realised that those for whom he had joined politics would prefer to see him as a football star instead of a politician. \u201cThat\u2019s why I have decided to move away from politics. Sometimes one has to give up smaller things for the sake of something bigger,\u201d he wrote. He said that the people who love him would prefer to see him as they always have, and he would hate it if people who have loved him thus now distance themselves from him.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t want my life to change,\u201d he wrote, adding that his family was also hurt by his decision (of joining politics). He also said that he had no anger or hatred for anyone and no one had influenced him to take the decision to detach himself from politics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
He had joined the BJP on Tuesday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":279,"featured_media":9990,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_seo_keywords":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8,6],"tags":[57,246,346,371,46],"class_list":["post-9988","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-new-bengal","category-politics","tag-bjp","tag-coronavirus-in-india","tag-coronavirus-in-kolkata","tag-lockdown-in-india","tag-trinamool-congress"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/279"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9988"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9988\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9990"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}