Mamata Banerjee on Tuesday said people could take a dip in the Ganga not once but a thousand times, but that wouldn’t make them holy or virtuous, alluding to Narendra Modi’s prayers before the river earlier in the day.

The Trinamool Congress chairperson asked — without naming Modi — if even a thousand dips in the waters of the Ganga made people pobitro (holy or virtuous).

“You know that sometimes we bathe in the Ganga, take a dip in the river, in the sea, in the water. The high tide brings with it bad things in the Ganga, the low tide takes all that away, it gets clear,” she told an election rally at Kalyani in Nadia district.

“Politics too is like high tides and low tides. We could bathe in the Ganga not once but a thousand times, but does that make everybody pobitro?” she asked, not long after the Prime Minister offered prayers at the Dashashwamedh Ghat on the banks of the Ganga and visited the Kaal Bhairav temple in Varanasi, before his nomination-filing from his Lok Sabha constituency.

The Bengal chief minister brought up the saffron regime’s mismanagement of the pandemic, recounting the countless bodies of deceased Covid-19 victims floating in the Ganga, from Uttar Pradesh, during the peak of the devastating second wave.

“During Covid-19, many people died in Uttar Pradesh. Not one was cremated, they were cast away in the holy Ganga. The Ganga was polluted. How was that caught? We detected many bodies in Malda,” said Mamata.

“Then we had them cremated with due dignity.... We don’t do these things,” she added. “In every home, some life was lost. We gave each and every one the minimum dignity, respect. But did the BJP do so? They did not.”

The chief minister mounted a scathing offensive on Modi over his so-called guarantees, warning against taking his word for it. “They have been going about saying ‘Prime Minister’s guarantee’.... If guarantees are issued and are not fulfilled, despite an ad blitz, it isn’t a guarantee.”

“Modi’s guarantees are 420 (fraudulent)... a rude shock of 440 volts if you touch them,” added Mamata.

Asserting that INDIA would form the next Union government, Mamata said the “only guarantee” was that Modi was not getting a third term as Prime Minister.

Recalling the near-incredible collapse of the BJP’s India Shining campaign for the 2004 general election — when Mamata was part of the NDA, and hers was the only one Lok Sabha seat her party won — the Trinamool chief said everybody had similarly assumed back then that the saffron camp retaining power was a foregone
conclusion.

“We all thought Atalji (Bihari Vajpayee) was retaining power. But he did not. Taking everyone along, Manmohanji (Singh) had become Prime Minister,” she said, referring to the UPA I government.

“There is jobbor khobor (major news). Hawa bodol hochchhey (The climate is changing).... Not everyone is able to say this, out of fear,” added Mamata. “Four phases have taken place. The BJP will, at the very most, get 195-200. INDIA will get 295-315 (the majority mark being 272).”

Tearing into the saffron ecosystem for allegedly curbing civil liberties and interfering in personal choices to impose the monochrome Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan vision that directly contradicts India’s pluralist ethos of unity in diversity, Mamata mocked Modi’s “400 paar” slogan.

“Not 400 paar, but pogarpaar (take to heels). So much jumla (means a figure of speech, but now considered synonymous with gimmick),” she said.

“Not one Bengali wants Modi to return,” added the chief minister.