Mamata Banerjee on Tuesday blew the poll conch for the next year’s Assembly election and read out her ekla chalo policy at a mammoth yearly rally to commemorate the death of 13 Youth Congress workers, who died in a police firing on July 21, 1993.
In the meeting attended by several lakhs of people, Banerjee singled out the BJP and the left and asserted that the “Trinamool Congress will never surrender before a communal and corrupt party that wins elections by engineering riots” and neither will it make friends with the left Front which had taken Bengal backward in its 34-year rule.
“We challenge the BJP to win even one seat next year. We will not allow their politics of communalism,” Banerjee thundered. Referring circuitously to the CBI and ED probe of the Saradha chit fund case, she said, “we will not succumb to any amount of arm-twisting by the various central agencies”, adding “the communal parties are themselves sunk in corruption are giving lessons to us on honesty.”
The Chief Minister’s attack on the saffron outfit was seen as a countermeasure against recent talks of BJP-Trinamool closeness that had allegedly led to the slowing down of CBI probe in Saradha case against the top ruling party leaders.
Attacking the Centre for “publicising social schemes for the sake of it”, the Chief Minister said, “there is no comparison between our Kanyashree and their ‘Beti Bachao Beti Padhao’ projects. They are only doing a lip service by earmarking a mere Rs100 crore out of which Rs50 crore is spent in advertisement only. Whereas our Kanyashree project is worth Rs1,000 crore and we have already registered more than 23 lakh girls in it.”
On Delhi’s “hollow promises” on Swachchh Bharat schemes, Banerjee said, “while they are making cheap publicity through such schemes, districts in Bengal like Nadia, Hooghly and Burdwan have already achieved 100 per cent sanitation.”
listing her Government’s achievements, the Chief Minister said the Trinamool Government had already provided 39 lakh jobs during its four-year rule and would create another 23 lakh jobs in a year’s time, adding that schemes are already afoot to recruit two lakh people in Government jobs.
Attacking the left Front for its “34 years of rule full of violence and bloodshed”, Banerjee said the left would never be allowed to come back in Bengal, adding, “I am creating such a situation and leaving such successors behind that left will not be able to rise up in 50 years’ time.”