n Senior Trinamool Congress leader and MP Kalyan Banerjee who had earlier this month courted controversy after mimicking Vice President Jagdeep Dhankhar outside the Parliament House on Monday justified his action saying it was a part of his fundamental right to expression.
“There is no question of any apology for exercising my fundamental rights,” Banerjee told a gathering. “Being a lawyer you (Dhankhar) know that the expanse of the Right to Freedom of Expression which is a Fundamental Right guaranteed in the Constitution … insofar as mimicry is concerned it is an art and a way of expressing oneself … by mimicking I had only expressed myself by exercising my fundamental right to freedom of expression,” Banerjee said.
Banerjee, a Trinamool Congress MP from Serampore Lok Sabha seat in Hooghly district further attacked the Vice President for failing to appreciate the dignity of his Chair and bowing before Prime Minister Narendra Modi to remain in his good books.
“He is the Vice President of the country … but he fails to understand the dignity of his Chair … he is only trying to please Prime Minister Narendra Modi and in doing so he is bowing down and down before him … how much he will bow down like this,” Banerjee asked, comparing him with former Vice President Venkaiah Naidu.
“Even Venkaiah Naidu was the Vice President of the country … and before being that he was the president of the BJP … but when it came to discharging his duties as the Speaker of Rajya Sabha he never acted in a partisan manner so as to please the Prime Minister … he never allowed the Opposition a chance to criticize him … he was far better than Dhankhar,” the TMC MP who has often courted controversy even in Bengal by using unparliamentary sentences against senior opposition leaders said.
Reacting to Banerjee’s statements, Bengal Opposition Leader Suvendu Adhikari said the TMC leader was one of such TMC politicians who had “no sense of decorum.” He said, “this man has done this earlier also …but the problem with a portion of our electorate is that they still vote for such people and as they get elected year after year they take it as their license to defy norms … these people can only be tamed down by the people … only after they are defeated in the elections they will realise their mistakes and mend them … otherwise it is very difficult to teach them decency.”
Another BJP leader Samik Bhattacharya said that Kalyan Banerjee represented the “breed of politician that TMC supremo Mamata Banerjee has created and nurtured … he definitely enjoys her backing in such acts otherwise he would ever have the courage to do so.”
