The Uttar Pradesh Government’s advertisement carrying a purported image of a Kolkata flyover to drive home its development initiatives has created major controversy with the Trinamool Congress on Sunday lashing out at the Yogi Adityanath Government for “acting like a Thagi (trickster) and not like a “yogi” (saint) by hoodwinking the people of that State with false publicity in order to win elections.
Reacting to the incident TMC national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee --- who is currently facing the Enforcement Directorate heat in a money-laundering case --- promptly wrote “Transforming UP for … Yogi Adityanath means stealing images from infrastructure seen in Bengal under Mamata (Banerjee’s) leadership and using them as his own! Looks like the 'DOUBLE ENGINE MODEL' has MISERABLY FAILED in BJP's strongest state and now stands EXPOSED for all!.”
Senior Trinamool MP Derek O Brien congratulated the UP Chief Minister for “finally acknowledging the good works being carried out by our Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.” Heaping more sarcasm he said “Yogi ji can take more of such advertisements from Bengal,” adding “while Mamata Banerjee has constructed 5,100 km or rural roads as compared to UP’s 1680 km.” He further listed the alleged low corruption data of Bengal saying “while Bengal registers only 0.2 percent of the corruption all over India Yogi ji’s UP accounts for 3.2 percent of the national average.”
Similarly while Bengal had created 97,000 work days for the members of Scheduled Caste the figure for UP is 67,000 work days he said adding “while UP has 57,000 hospital beds, Bengal has 86,000,” and calling upon the UP Chief Minister “to take away all these advertisements of Bengal to hoodwink the people of his State.”
TMC national vice president Mukul Roy who left the BJP to return to his old party after the State elections wrote “Mr Narendra Modi is so helpless to save his party that other than changing CMs, he has also had to resort to using pictures of growth & infrastructure seen under Mamata Banerjee’s leadership, as his own.” Curiously the CPI(M) leadership promptly jumped in to clarify that theadvertisements shown “neither belongs to the so-called developmentprojects of Yogi or Mamata Banerjee … one RTI and government records will show that these projects belong to the Left era … Mamata Banerjee only named them.”
The national newspaper which carried the advertisement however issued an immediate corrigendum regretting the inadvertently included cover collage of the advertorial. “A wrong image was inadvertently included in the cover collage of the advertorial on Uttar Pradesh produced by the marketing department of the newspaper,” it wrote.
When reminded of the corrigendum being issued by the said newspaper senior TMC leader Arup Chakrabarty alleged “the newspaper must have been coerced by the BJP to accept the said mistake … otherwise it would have to face the same fate of Dainik Bhaskar.”
He said apart from non-performance the BJP had been coercing the entire media of the country into silence. “Unprecedented and undeclared media censorship is going on in Bengal … look at how the newspapers in Tripura are being shut down just because they are highlighting the attacks on the TMC and Abhishek Banerjee in that State.”