Kolkata Sep 18 (IANS): Former Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer Jawhar Sircar, who had recently resigned as a Trinamool Congress Rajya Sabha member, on Wednesday said that he was feeling "relieved" after quitting the party and regretted his decision to join it.

"You know why I have quit. I am so relieved now. I should not have joined the party at all. In 2021 when there was such a wave in the country of all anti-BJP forces joining hands, I joined. I was sent to the Rajya Sabha where I could express my views," said Sircar at a convention of Kolkata’s iconic Presidency College, of which he is an alumnus.

Sircar also demanded that the real culprits behind the ghastly rape and murder of the junior doctor of R.G. Kar Medical College & Hospital in Kolkata last month should be identified and punished.

Earlier this month, Sircar communicated his decision to resign from the Rajya Sabha as well as to quit politics through a letter to Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee where he cited the recent ghastly rape and murder of a junior doctor at R.G. Kar and the general corruption in state governance as the reason that prompted him to take this decision.

"I have never witnessed such grievance and non-confidence against any government ever in my life. After carefully observing the sequence of events on the R.G. Kar issue for the last month a question came to my mind on why you are not directly interacting with the protesting junior doctors as you used to do before," Sircar said in his message to the Chief Minister.

He also said that since the current protests on this issue have been totally apolitical and spontaneous in nature, it would be unfair to resist this movement by giving it a political tag.