Home Minister Amit Shah on Saturday warned West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee that her days were numbered adding that the BJP will form the government in the state by winning more than 200 seats in the next year’s assembly polls.
Addressing a huge rally in Midnapore, Shah said that Banerjee would remain alone in her party, claiming that more senior Trinamool Congress leaders were destined to join the BJP. This was after a former cabinet colleague of Banerjee, Suvendu Adhikari, officially joined the saffron party along with his supporters.
Shah said that Banerjee was preventing farmers in the state from receiving financial assistance provided by the Centre’s Narendra Modi government. The home minister also read out the names of people, who he said were killed for their association with the BJP.
Shah said that the BJP government would turn Bengal into a land of gold (sonar Bangla) after the next assembly elections.
Adhikari, for his part, said that Bengal could not be developed without ensuring a BJP government in the state. He told the crowd at Midnapore College ground that his prime goal now was to ensure that the government led by Mamata Banerjee was ousted. In a veiled dig at his former leader, Adhikari said that he only considered two entities as his mother, one his biological mother and the other being his motherland. No one else, he continued, was his mother.
Adhikari severed ties with the Trinamool Congress on 16 December days after quitting the state cabinet. Elected on a Trinamool Congress ticket from the Nandigram assembly constituency of the East Midnapore district, Adhikari has been maintaining a distance from the TMC for many weeks. It was the famous anti-land acquisition movement of Nandigram in 2009 that had helped Mamata Banerjee successfully end the three decades of the Left rule in West Bengal. Two years after the Nandigram agitation, Banerjee became the first-ever chief minister of West Bengal from the TMC.