A Trinamool Congress team led by party supremo and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee which met Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Delhi has been left disheartened at what is seen as the PM’s “perfunctory attitude” while listening to their grievances regarding non-payment of Central dues.
Mamata Banerjee led a 10-member team of party MPs from the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha to a scheduled 20-minute meeting with the Prime Minister. Incidentally, the meeting took place after the name of Kalyan Banerjee was dropped from the list. Kalyan Banerjee is facing criticism for mimicking Vice-President Jagdeep Dhankar at the steps of the Parliament yesterday.
“Though the Prime Minister met us and gave us a hearing, we could very well feel that this was just a perfunctory meeting. After listening to us, he said that a meeting of senior officials from both the Centre and the State should sit down together to thrash out all contentious matters. Nothing beyond that. There was no assurance of any kind,” an MP who attended the meeting told The Daily Guardian.
Sources said that at the meeting in Delhi, Mamata Banerjee apprised PM Modi over pending Central funds for West Bengal. “We didn’t even get a penny for 100 days of work under MGNREGA in the budget for 2022-23. Funds for Pradhan Mantri Aawas Yojana have been stopped, rural development schemes have been shut, and the health mission programme has also been shut,’ said Bengal CM Banerjee.
After coming out from the meeting, Mamata Banerjee said: “Our officials have given all the clarification they asked for. The PM has said a joint meeting will be held by the Centre and State officials. I said we have given clarification 155 times. We can do that once again, they can decide the formula. In a federal structure, the Central Government has a share and the State also has a share,” she said.
“It is not right to stop the money for poor people,” Banerjee said, adding that the Centre owed Rs 1.15 lakh crore to West Bengal.
In Kolkata, Leader of the Opposition in the State Assembly and BJP leader Suvendu Adhikari refused to give any importance to the meeting. “After siphoning thousands of crores of money sent by our Modi ji’s Sarkar for the poor people of the State and depriving people of their just dues, Mamata Banerjee has gone to Delhi to do drama,” he said.
With Mamata Banerjee in Delhi, Suvendu Adhikari along with three other MLAs on Wednesday morning paid a surprise visit to State secretariat Nabanna and staged a poster campaign on the misutilisation of Central funds allocated to the State Government.
He had a brief interaction with Chief Secretary Hari Krishna Dwivedi at his office at Nabanna. “We came here without an appointment since, if we had informed, they would not have allowed us to enter the secretariat. There are preventive orders on gatherings under Section 144 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC) in force around Nabanna and because we are law-abiding citizens, only four of our MLAs came here to tell people how this Government is depriving them,” Adhikari told reporters after coming out of the State secretariat.
Adhikari, along with other MLAs, were seen waiting at the visitors’ room at Nabanna, holding posters elaborating the “allocation of funds to the State by the Centre and how much was spent”, before the meeting with the Chief Secretary.
Security in and around the State secretariat was immediately beefed up after the visit of the BJP leaders, a senior officer of Kolkata Police said.
