Kolkata: Senior Trinamool Congress leader Abhishek Banerjee on Friday said the party will launch a bigger movement, in which West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee will also participate, if a response from the Centre regarding the state’s MGNREGA dues is not received by the end of this month.
Addressing a meeting in South 24 Parganas district’s Bishnupur, which falls under his Diamond Harbour Lok Sabha constituency, the TMC national general secretary said, “People of West Bengal have worked for two years but have not received their wages under the scheme. I had asked people to choose between ‘Paa Dhoro’ (beg them) and ‘Delhi Chalo’ (march to Delhi) options to get their dues and they chose the latter.”
“Trains were cancelled at the last moment to prevent West Bengal’s poor from reaching Delhi to fight for their rights. Permission for protests was also not granted,” he said.
Banerjee, while recalling the TMC’s stir earlier this month over the issue, alleged that Union Minister of State for Rural Development, Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti had not met their delegation at Krishi Bhavan in Delhi after making them wait for over three years and a day later, “more than one lakh people participated in Raj Bhavan Abhiyaan”, referring to a sit-in demonstration outside the governor’s house in Kolkata.
“We were on the road for five days. On October 9, Governor CV Ananda Bose was forced to meet us. He assured us that within 24 hours, he would talk to the central government over this deprivation of West Bengal. The governor went to Delhi and informed me in an email that he had held discussions with the Centre on the matter. Since we have waited for two years, we can wait for a few more days,” he said.
“But if there was no proper response from the Centre on the issue of release of MGNREGA funds within October 31, the TMC will organise a larger movement, in which Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee will also participate,” he added.
On the state panchayat polls held in July, he said that contrary to the opposition’s claims that its candidates were threatened and intimidated in the wake of the TMC winning over 80 per cent of the seats, around 1.5 lakh nominations were filed by opposition contestants.
Instead, accusing the BJP government at the Centre of “practising the politics of intimidation, threat and coercion” against the TMC in West Bengal, he said, “Neither Prime Minister Narendra Modi nor Union Home Minister Amit Shah could wean away people’s verdict from the TMC despite their repeated visits to the state in the run-up to the 2021 assembly polls, and hence they are using central agencies and a section of the media to gag the voice of the opposition.”
“Despite many attempts, the Narendra Modi government could not make me surrender. The people of West Bengal are witnesses to how the central agencies and media were being used to defame me. But I still walk with my head held high because I was born in West Bengal,” he said in an apparent reference to the repeated summons to him and his family by the ED and the CBI in connection with school job recruitment scam, coal and cattle smuggling cases.
