West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee today took to Facebook to make clear her position on “Jai Shree Ram” chants that Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) workers have been using to “greet” her, and what has infuriated her twice already.
BJP workers have taken resort to the slogan twice in presence of the Trinamool Congress chief – once before the election and another time when she was on her way to North 24 Parganas on Friday – and she lost her cool both times. Yesterday, two of her cabinet colleagues were also “greeted” with the same slogans when they visited a party office in North 24 Parganas.
Banerjee on Sunday wrote on Facebook that she has “no problem” with any “particular slogan of political parties in their rallies, and for their party purpose”.
“Every political party has their own slogan. My party has Jai Hind, Vande Mataram. The Left has Inquilab Zindabad. Others have different slogans. We respect each other,” she wrote, adding, “Jai Sia Ram, Jai Ram ji ki, Ram naam Satya hai etc have religious and social connotations. We respect these sentiments.”
However, she added that the BJP was “using religious slogan Jai Sri Ram as their party slogan in a misconceived manner by way of mixing religion with politics. We do not respect this forcible enforcement of political slogans on others in the name of so called RSS which Bengal never accepted.”
She said it was a “deliberate attempt to sell hatred ideology through vandalism and violence which we must oppose together”.
The West Bengal CM further wrote that some BJP supporters were trying to spread hatred through the media and fake videos, news and misinformation “to create confusion”. She said that Bengal has always been progressive and a place for harmony, but now this strategy adopted by the BJP was to target Bengal in a negative way.
Banerjee wrote that proper action will be taken to restrain political workers who were trying to create unrest and disrupting normal life “by taking recourse to misplaced ideologies” in the name of religion in order to divide people.
She said that people in the country and the state will give a fitting reply to hatred politics.
