Mamata Banerjee on Wednesday chose triple talaq Bill and “National Register of Citizens (NRC) drama” in Assam to accuse the Centre of “playing with fire” and warned the fire “would one day burn your tent.”
Apparently befuddled over the possibility of losing a chunk of her electoral mainstay, the Muslim women to the BJP, post the passage of triple talaq Bill and worried over a likely influx of “Bengali refugees” whose names get struck out from the national citizenship register in Assam, the Bengal Chief Minister said the “BJP has engaged in a divisive politics” but warned, “Trinamool Congress will take you on everywhere from Parliament to the streets.”
Calling the Bill a “highly confusing exercise full of defects” Banerjee said, “this defective Bill will not empower the women, rather it will create victims and leave many more Muslim women helpless.”
She told a rally in Birbhum that her party was always in favour of women’s rights and “we indeed help the Muslim women in distress,” but this is a Bill that would further drive them and their families into anarchy and break their homes.
The State BJP leadership promptly reacted saying “Didi is herself publicising the Bill’s content in the rural areas which in itself a social service.”
Banerjee also attacked the Centre for “playing with fire” in Assam by staging the “so-called national register drama,” which she said was a ploy to drive out the Bengalis from that State.
Names of more than a crore people have been struck out of the citizenship register she said adding the “undemocratic exercise would affect all the neighbouring States.”
She alleged “they (the Assam BJP) have a plan to beat away the Bengali population from that State. But this will not be without a political ramification.” She added “I will warn the BJP against playing with fire. Don’t play with fire because one day it will burn your tent also.”
She wondered “why the Government is harassing the people who came to Bengal after 1971 war from Bangladesh.”
Sources close to the Chief Minister said that though she was worried about a possible influx of “refugees” from Assam to Bengal in the wake of the citizenship registry drive her Wednesday’s statement was aimed at the minority gallery residing in the 8-9 districts of Bengal bordering Bangladesh.