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Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee on Wednesday seemed to heckle the BJP by hobnobbing with three of the ruling party’s in-house critics — Yashwant Sinha, Arun Shourie and Shatrughan Sinha. The BJP flared up, accusing the West Bengal Chief Minister of neglecting her Constitutional duties in favour of “playing petty politics”.
Banerjee has been in Delhi for the last two days, projecting her national ambitions with a series of meetings with all Opposition party leaders, including one with UPA Chairperson Sonia Gandhi on Wednesday evening.
The TMC chief’s formula — designed to defeat the BJP in the 2019 general elections while also containing the Congress on her turf — is to have a “one-to-one” fight. In simple terms, she explained, the Lok Sabha elections should be strategised as an aggregate of States with powerful regional leaders taking on the BJP in straight fights across provinces. Thus the DMK should fight the BJP in Tamil Nadu, and her TMC in West Bengal, while the SP-BSP alliance should battle it out with the saffron party in Uttar Pradesh. Inherent in the formula is a warning to the Congress to contain its ambitions in States where there are powerful regional parties.
The goal, she said, is to defeat the BJP. Banerjee’s formula found favour in BJP rebel leader Arun Shourie, who told reporters after meeting her this afternoon that her “one-to-one” formula is good and “smaller parties can give a good fight to the BJP in States”. Shourie also attacked Prime Minister Narendra Modi and underlined that he had “lost control” over governance.
The BJP was clearly outraged. Union Minister Prakash Javdekar, party MP Rupa Ganguly, and Banerjee’s erstwhile lieutenant Mukul Roy, told a news conference that “Bengal is burning while Mamata is playing petty politics”.
Javdekar said peaceful Ram Navami processions in Bengal were attacked by Trinamool Congress (TMC) “thugs” under the police’s watch. “It is like Nero fiddled while Rome was burning,” he said.
“Innocent devotees of Lord Ram were attacked by TMC thugs in the state and the West Bengal government is doing nothing about it,” Javdekar said.
He accused Banerjee of being insensitive towards the Bengalis and said “this attitude of the TMC supremo is an insult to the people’s mandate”. “It is also an insult to the Chief Minister’s post,” he added.
“The West Bengal chief minister is free to do politics and the BJP is quite capable of responding to it. But one should not do politics on the cost of the state and her Constitutional duties,” he said.
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