The Bharatiya Janata Party is driving a wedge in the Indian society in order to polarise the people. This they are doing by twisting and misinterpreting the history of the country, Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Tuesday said, launching a blistering attack on the saffron outfit.
Mamata, who was addressing a public programme in Coochbehar, the northern-most district of Bengal bordering Assam said the BJP-ruled North-eastern State and the one ruled by the same party far west in Gujarat presented the same picture in terms of the saffron outfit’s nefarious designs to distort history and create schism in the masses to garner votes.
“Sectarian bigotry has no place in the history of India,” Mamata said reminding the BJP will never be able to vitiate the minds of the people of Bengal as they had seen through its divisive politics and they will not encourage sectarianism.
Attacking the BJP for trying to divide the people on the basis of caste, creed and religion Mamata recalled how names of 40 lakh citizens —including a large number of Bengalis — from Assam had been deleted from the National Register of Citizens, making people alien in their own homeland driving some of them to commit suicide and compared it with the mass ouster of Biharis from Gujarat another saffron State.
“Like they are driving away about 40 lakh people including Bengalis from Assam in the name of NRC they are throwing out Biharis from Gujarat” — in clear defiance of the basic structure of our Constitution, Mamata said adding “the Constitution treats everyone equally. We cannot differentiate between people on the basis of caste, creed and religion.”
“We must not forget the sayings of Mahatma Gandhi who took fasted for so many days at Beleghata in olkata as a protest against religious riots,” Mamata said while referring to the recent Gujarat violence that saw about 60 lakh Hindi speaking people fleeing that State in the wake of the arrest of a Bihari labourer in connection of a rape — and subsequent violence.
Referring to the distribution of land documents in Chitmahals (enclaves that joined India from Bangladesh in 2015) Banerjee said the issue would be soon resolved. The Chief Minister who reportedly warned the officials against slackness in issuing documents to the land holders said the Government would do the job at the earliest.
Attacking the Centre for only mouthing tall promises without delivering on the ground, Banerjee reminded how the world had acknowledged her Government’s public welfare schemes — like Kanyashree, Sabuj Sathi, etc — in which about Rs 6,000 crore had been spent.
