Kulpi (West Bengal), Feb 13: Claiming that it would take 10 years to complete the COVID-19 vaccination process in the country, senior Trinamool Congress leader Abhishek Banerjee on Saturday accused Union Home Minister Amit Shah of misleading members of the Matua community on providing citizenship to them.
Shah attacked the Mamata Banerjee government for opposing the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) at public meetings in West Bengal on Thursday, and asserted that the contentious citizenship law would be enforced after the completion of the coronavirus inoculation programme.
Referring to TMC leader Dinesh Trivedi’s resignation from Rajya Sabha on Friday months before the assembly polls, Abhishek Banerjee who is the youth wing president of the party and a Lok Sabha MP, said, “Trivedi said he was feeling suffocated. Let him go and get admitted to the BJP’s ICU. “Shah said that the CAA will be implemented once the COVID vaccination work is completed in the country. It will take 10 years to complete the vaccination process in the entire country. He is misleading the Matuas, Banerjee said while addressing a public meeting at Kulpi in South 24 Parganas district. Matuas, originally from East Pakistan, are weaker section of Hindus who migrated to India during the Partition and after the creation of Bangladesh. Many of them have been accorded Indian citizenship but a sizeable section of the population has not got it.
The Matua community, with an estimated population of three million in the state, can tilt the scales in favour of a political party in at least four Lok Sabha seats more than 30 assembly seats in Nadia, and North and South 24 Parganas districts. It once stood behind the TMC but had supported the BJP in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. Now, both the BJP and the TMC are wooing the Matua people ahead of the assembly election due in April-May.
On Shah’s statement that the TMC will be uprooted from West Bengal in the assembly polls, he said that the TMC is not a cutout which one can uproot. “It is a party of grassroots. The more you cut it, the more it will grow.”
Claiming that the only poll plank of the BJP is ‘Jai Shri Ram’ and it has no development agenda, the TMC leader alleged that the saffron party does not know to give respect to women. (PTI)
