A fuming Trinamool Congress leadership on Thursday boycotted the inaugural ceremony of Kolkata East-West Metro corridor in Salt Lake section after the Bengal ruling outfit complained that Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee had not been invited in the programme.
The project was inaugurated by Railway Minister Piyush Goyal and attended among others by his ministerial colleague Babul Supriyo and some senior leaders of the BJP.
Senior TMC leader and local MP Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar and State Minister and local TMC MLA Sujit Bose was however invited to the programme. Both of them decided not to attend the show in protest against what the party leadership called a “filthy exhibition of indecorous the behavior” by the saffron leadership and the Central Government which controls the Metro Railways.
Both BJP sources and Metro authorities however said the Chief Minister had been invited for the programme. “Twice out representatives had visited the State secretariat Nabanna,” Metro sources said only to be promptly contradicted by the TMC leadership which wondered “how if the Chief Minister was invited twice her name did not figure in the invitation card issued by the authorities.”
Trinamool leader and Minister Tapas Roy speaking on behalf of the State Government said “such indecorous treatment is the last thing you can expect during Government-to-Government transactions,” adding other invitees (TMC leaders) from the State Government were right in their decision to skip the programme.
“Can you imagine how the lady who conceived and green-signaled the East-West Metro project during her stint as the Railway Minister of India would be ignored and left out in such a manner… By doing so you are not humiliating the Chief Minister but you are belittling your own (central) Government. It shows the political culture your party (BJP) represents,” the fuming Minister said.
“The East-West Metro corridor project was brainchild of Mamata Banerjee during her tenure as Railway Minister from 2009-2011. It was she who had sanctioned the money in Railway budget. Now, when the project is being inaugurated she has not been invited. This is an insult to the people of Bengal,” Dastidar said.
Reacting to the TMC leader’s decision to boycott the programme BJP State president Dilip Ghosh said that he had information that the Chief Minister seldom attended the programmes hosted by the Centre. This was the reason why she might not have been invited, he said.
Besides, Mamata Baneree should herself consider the precedent she created in the past by showing indecorous behavior to the then State Government, he maintained adding “when she was the Railway Minister she never invited the then Chief Minister Buddadeb Bhattacharjee and now she is raising the same issue of which she herself is guilty.”
Kolkata is the first city in India to have started Metro Railway services way back in 1984. TK Nath the motorman who drove the first tube railway in Kolkata said “I am feeling nostalgic and keen to see a fellow motorman getting the same experience today.”
The new East-West metro which will be opened to public from Friday is the first such project in the country to pass under water. It will run underneath the River Hooghly for a kilometer before reaching Howrah and joining the satellite city with Salt Lake after it is completed.