Barely a week away from the Statewide civic elections scheduled for April 18, the BJP on Monday announced its decision to sue Mamata Banerjee for making misleading statements on her income from the sale of her paintings. Hours later, the Bengal Chief Minister shot back vowing to send the saffron outfit packing much the way “the Delhi electorate did to them in the recent past.”
State BJP president Rahul Sinha said his party would “move court in quest of justice as the Chief Minister is trying to befool the people by giving various figures from various platforms that she derived from the sale of her paintings.” The Chief Minister had told an election meeting a couple of days ago that her paintings had fetched Rs2 crore. However the next day at a different meeting she said it was Rs9 crore. Interestingly, the IT returns filed by her party, showing the proceeds from the sales of paintings, gave a third figure that was somewhere between Rs2 crore and Rs9 crore.
The Chief Minister had also said that a stroke of her brush could bring her Rs10 lakh. “How does the price of my paintings affect anyone’s father or grandfather,” she asked in a rally raising a hue and cry regarding her unparliamentarily language. Banerjee had also told that she had several hundred paintings to her credit out of which about 200 were gifted away and about 300 were sold.
Reports that one of her paintings were sold for Rs1.84 crore had raised many eyebrows and the story became a hot topic during the 2014 general elections with Prime Minister Narendra Modi also raising it at her election meetings. While the Opposition demanded a probe to find out whether her sales of her paintings had chit fund connections, the CBI early this month wrote to the Trinamool Congress national general secretary to explain the party’s income and expenditure for the past four years including its earnings from advertisements, donations and not the least sale of paintings.
A visibly incensed Banerjee resorted to retaliatory firing from a poll meeting late on Monday evening vouching once again that the party is a poor outfit and insisting “the BJP will get “gol gappa (draw a blank) in the civic elections much the way they performed in the Delhi elections.” Attacking the saffron outfit she said, “This party had claimed to have brought a Swachchha (clean) Government and Achchhe Din (good days) but within months of coming to power, they were rejected by the people of Delhi and voters cutting across economic classes voted against them. They will get a gol gappa in the ensuing Bihar elections also. We will also send them packing with a big gol gappa.”
The left, BJP and the Congress had no backbone and were like creepers that were supporting each other for survival, she maintained. Meanwhile, violence continued across the State with alleged Trinamool supporters attacking the opposition party men and the police looking the other way lending voice to the clamour for central forces in the April 18 and 25 municipal polls. Incidents of clashes came from Siliguri, Balurghat, Birbhum, Burdwan and North 24 and South 24 Parganas, sources said adding the opposition parties were not being allowed to campaign.