Didi & Modi are not the same: Mamata Banerjee tells CPIM & Congress on CAA issue

Mamata Banerjee today appealed to the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the Congress to come together to join her in protesting the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) issue. During the discussion in the Assembly on the CAA, Banerjee urged the Opposition CPIM and the Congress to understand the importance of opposing the CAA and added that their repeated target being Banerjee herself was in fact, “diluting” the impact of the protest. The Bengal Assembly passed an anti-CAA resolution today.

She said it is important for the Congress, CPIM and the Trinamool Congress in the state to come together on opposing this Act that had scared people across the nation. She said that “Didi and Modi” were not the same, and this slogan and position of the CPIM and the Congress would boomerang and hit them hard.

Earlier, she spoke along the same lines during a session with young members of her party, the Trinamool Congress at a workshop in Netaji Indoor Stadium. Banerjee said that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) workers had told people in various parts of the state to submit their Aadhar card numbers to the party office. “Why should they do that?” Banerjee asked, adding that she had with her such a leaflet she had collected from Jhargram. She said that some nongovernmental organisations were doing this work for the BJP against money.

During her session with her party members, Banerjee also said that people could eat and wear anything they wanted and they weren’t bonded labourers. Her comments were a reference to senior BJP leader Kailash Vijayvargiya’s statement of certain group of people having flattened rice (chira) to be suspected of being Bangladeshis. It was also a reference to Prime Minister Narendra Modi stating that people could be identified from the clothes they wore.

Banerjee went on to say that she didn’t attend the recent meeting on National Population Register (NPR) held by the Centre because she was sure that if she had submitted a note of dissent by opposing the exercise, it would have been rejected by the Centre. “Attendance in such meetings come to mean becoming party to it,” she said. She was also in fact referring to the fact that the Congress-led governments in many states attended the meeting despite opposing NRC-CAA-NPR. “If there is no one around, I will go ahead on my own alone,” she reiterated. “If the idea is to isolate me in this, so be it,” she said.

Banerjee, while speaking at Netaji Indoor Stadium added that the protests against CAA-NPR-NRC will have to be led by the students and she hoped that the leaders of future will come up from among them. Various programmes by the youth and women’s wings of the party will continue with the protests, she added.

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