Hours after the DMK put UPA-II on notice stirring speculations of a general election, some of Mamata Banerjee’s ardent followers including former Union Minister Sultan Ahmed on Tuesday emphatically claimed that their Didi too was in the race for 7, Race Course Road.
“If you talk about prime ministership, we must say that the name of our supremo, our party chief Mamata Banerjee cannot be ruled out. She is very much in the race,” Ahmed, now a Trinamool Congress MP, said reminding how the Bengal Chief Minister had barely a few days ago presaged “general elections are two-three
months away.”
In a curious coincidence, hundreds of miles away at Jangalmahal, attending a meeting an apparently embarrassed Banerjee struggled hard to explain the reason behind a surprisingly sparse attendance.
If her previous rallies were oceans this was clearly a pond, conceded district party leader but attributed the low turnout to a hot summer day.
Top Trinamool crowd-pullers like Banerjee, Mukul Roy, the Chief Minister’s Nandigram spearhead Subhendu Adhikary looked blankly from the dais while barely a thousand-plus listeners collected in a field that can accommodate 50,000 people.
She reportedly reprimanded her crowd managers like Adhikary in private but publicly she said “I had drawn forward the programme by a couple of hours which is why the attendance is so less” congratulating the next moment those “thousands of people who have poured in to listen to me” at Binpur in West Midnapore.
This was her sixth visit to Jangalmahal in the past 20 months announcing 49 projects worth crores.
The Chief Minister spared no words on her stated Race Course Road dreams neither she spoke on the DMK affair but she reminded once again how discriminatory politics of the Centre and faulty policy previous Marxist rulers had ruined the State economically.
The Centre was playing “politics of money,” she said adding how Delhi squeezed out `25,000 crore “while our earning is only `21,000 crore and our expenditure is `42,000 crore.”
Meanwhile CPI(M) MP Shyamal Chakrabarty said “the poor attendance shows her decreasing popularity.” PCC chief Pradip Bhattacharya said he had not seen such a low turnout in Banerjee’s rally adding, “This is the result of false promises. The people have started realising that most of promises are false and so they are discarding her.” BJP State president Rahul Sinha said “The days of her gimmickry is over.”