On Friday, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee received a visit from Janata Dal – Secular (JDS) leader and former Karnataka Chief Minister HD Kumaraswamy in Kolkata. They met to talk about the upcoming Karnataka Assembly elections, and the developments in national politics.
The discussion was held at the All India Trinamool Congress (TMC) chief’s Kalighat residence. The Bengal CM also assured the ex-JDS president that she will campaign for his party in the 2023 state assembly elections.
The meeting between the two took place amid efforts by leaders of several opposition parties to form a cohesive opposition alliance in order to challenge the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) at the centre in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
Mamata’s meeting with Kumaraswamy occurred one day after the CM met with her colleague from Odisha, Naveen Patnaik, in Bhubaneswar on Thursday. According to her party, she reiterated the necessity of bolstering India’s federal framework and ensuring accountability at all levels of government during her meeting with the Odisha CM.
Mamata Banerjee’s stand against ‘outsiders’ in Bengal
Notably, TMC continuously described the BJP as ‘a party of outsiders’ as a strategy in the 2021 West Bengal assembly elections.
Referring to the Union Home Minister Amit Shah as an ‘outsider,’ she claimed, “There is no place for outsiders in Bengal. Those who have made Bengal their home out of love are our friends. They are our people. But those who come just before elections to foment communal trouble are nothing but outsiders.”
She went further and alleged her party consider only those ‘pan masala-chewing, tilak-sporting’ people sent from states like Uttar Pradesh ‘to foment trouble’ before elections in West Bengal as outsider goons.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi slammed her remarks and said branding BJP leaders as ‘outsiders’ is an insult to the inclusive ideology of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and the principles of the Indian Constitution.
She once more alluded to the BJP as an ‘outsider party’ in Goa in 2019. She even invoked her caste card and called herself a ‘Brahmin.’ She urged people to vote against BJP in the state elections and added that she does not want ‘outsiders to control Goa.’
She even accused the doctors of being ‘outsiders’ in 2019 when doctors across the state shut down services in a show of protest after doctors and interns at the NRS Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata were attacked following the death of Mohammed Sayeed.