KOLKATA, July 4: Launching a blistering counterattack against the rebel faction that has torn the Trinamool Congress apart, party supremo Mamata Banerjee on Saturday accused the dissidents of conspiring with the BJP to engineer a split and dared them to formally join the saffron party if they had the courage.
In an emotionally charged Facebook Live address, her first since the party plunged into its worst organisational crisis, Banerjee defended her leadership, lashed out at the rebels, vowed to press ahead with the TMC’s July 21 Martyrs’ Day rally despite administrative hurdles, and declared that while individuals may desert the party, “an institution does not cease to exist”.
Responding to the allegations, the BJP claimed that leaders were quitting TMC because the cut money, which “acted as its binding glue”, has been stopped after the saffron party came to power.“I dare the treacherous and ungrateful traitors who are abandoning the party to directly join the BJP and take me on if they have the courage to do so, instead of playing this dishonest BJP-sponsored game,” Banerjee said on a day she lost another long-time associate Chandrima Bhattacharya, who quit as TMC’s West Bengal president and other party positions.She announced that, alongside fulfilling her responsibilities as the party’s chairperson, she would also function as the TMC’s Bengal president till such time veteran leader Subrata Bakshi, who is currently indisposed, is nursed back to health.
Banerjee also announced the induction of party leaders Kunal Ghosh and Madan Mitra as general secretaries.“You call yourself rebels? Where was your rebellion before the elections?
Where was your dissent during the last 15 years when you were MPs and MLAs on TMC tickets and operated as ministers and in other important government positions? Why didn’t you come to me then and voice your differences,” she said, attacking the dissenters.
Calling workers who remain loyal in “these difficult times” as the “party’s goldmine”, Banerjee advised the rebels, who “have betrayed and quit the party with their luggage and baggage” to ensure they did not commit “the same treachery with the people who voted for them”.
About Bhattacharya’s exit, the TMC supremo sounded nonchalant. “Chandrima had been saying for some time now that she wants to resign. Her son had already joined hands with them (the rebels). It doesn’t matter to me if a few leaders here and there desert the party and join hands with the BJP,” she said.
Referring to the Ritabrata Banerjee-led rebel faction moving the Election Commission, staking claim to the party’s twin flower symbol, Banerjee said the people of Bengal will see through such “treacherous moves”. (PTI)
