West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Friday hit back at Prime Minister Narendra Modi for asking at a rally the previous day whether she will contest the Assembly elections from another constituency, PTI reported.
“I am not your party member that you will suggest me to contest from another seat,” Banerjee said, while campaigning in Cooch Behar. “I want to tell the prime minister to control his home minister [Amit Shah] first and then try to control us. We are not your party’s members that you will control us.”
Banerjee claimed that she will win Assembly elections from Nandigram constituency, where she is pitted against her former aide Suvendu Adhikari, a Bharatiya Janata Party candidate.
Banerjee also accused central forces of creating chaos at the homes of Trinamool Congress leaders in Nandigram. “I urge all my mothers and sisters, resist the central forces if they come and threaten you,” she said.
The West Bengal chief minister urged the people to vote for her party. “I know I will win, but along with me, at least 200 candidates have to win so that we can make our government,” she said, according to ANI.
On Thursday, the Trinamool Congress had also criticised Modi for claiming that Banerjee was considering fighting elections from another constituency because she was concerned about her defeat in Nandigram.
“Didi [Banerjee] is winning Nandigram,” the party said in a tweet. “The question of her fighting from another seat doesn’t arise.”
The party also asked the prime minister to find a safer seat to contest in the 2024 General Assembly elections as he would be challenged in Uttar Pradesh’s Varanasi. This has been Modi’s constituency since 2014, when he first came to power after BJP’s landslide victory.
Mamata Banerjee has lost Nandigram, claims Amit Shah
Meanwhile, Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Friday claimed that Banerjee will not win from the Nandigram seat, ANI reported.
“The scenes that you witnessed yesterday [Thursday] tell that she is losing in Nandigram,” Shah said at a rally in Alipurduar in West Bengal.
Shah said that the Trinmool Congress government was running on the model of “Tolabaji [extortion], Tanashahi [dictatorship] and Tushtikaran [appeasement]”, PTI reported.
Nandigram went to polls in the second phase of the West Bengal Assembly elections on Thursday. During the voting, a clash broke out between TMC and BJP supporters at one of the booths in the district.
The Election Commission sought a report about the incident from the local administration. However, after voting concluded, the poll panel said that General Observer Hemen Das, who was sent to the Boyal booth on the basis of media coverage, said in his report that polling was not disrupted at any moment.
The poll body also said that a separate complaint filed on the matter by Banerjee has been forwarded to the special general observer and special police observer. They have been asked to send a report on the incident by 6 pm on Friday.
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