Congress MP Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday tried to drive home the point that his party was equidistant with the BJP and the Trinamool Congress in Bengal.
In the national Opposition space, Trinamool is a key constituent of INDIA, the anti-BJP bloc.
Rahul, who spoke at public meetings in North Dinajpur’s Raiganj, Malda’s Chanchal and Murshidabad’s Samserganj, trained guns on Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the trade deal with the US and also accused Trinamool of paving the way for the BJP in Bengal.
“If the TMC had done its job, the BJP could not have made inroads here. It is because of the TMC that the BJP got the opportunity to get into Bengal,” Rahul said at a public meeting in Raiganj.
In the 2021 Assembly elections, when Congress had joined hands with the Left, Rahul had abstained from campaigning in Bengal.
Rahul also referred to corruption while bracketing both the BJP and Trinamool. “Narendra Modi is a compromised Prime Minister, and he and his party are into corruption. But the TMC is no less in the race of corruption. Jobs of teachers were sold in Bengal. While Modi has devastated the industrial sector of the country, the TMC government has done the same in Bengal. Thousands of crores were looted from lakhs of depositors through chit fund scams, and no one got money back,” Rahul said.
He tore into the Trinamool government on the issue of employment and said that before the 2021 Assembly polls, Mamata promised to provide five lakh
jobs to youths. “Interestingly, 84 lakh youths of the state applied for the monthly unemployment allowance. This is utterly disappointing and proves that the state is in a shambles,” Rahul said.
Bengal, Rahul said, was being run by Trinamool’s syndicate. The same charge is levelled against Mamata Banerjee’s party by both the BJP and the Left.
“Like the BJP, the TMC also perpetrates violence and makes false promises. We are aware of the coal smuggling scam, illegal mining (of minor minerals) and ‘goonda tax’, collected by syndicates to fund the TMC. On the other hand, common people in the state are deprived of benefits and development,” Rahul said in Samserganj.
“There is no accountability in Bengal. Whatever the TMC’s goons want to do, they do it. If a common man knows a TMC leader or minister, or a goon backed by the party, only then can he get his work done. Or else, it is not done,” he said.
The Congress leader accused the BJP of “politics of hate” and for playing the polarisation card to
divide votes.
“The BJP gets into malpractices to win elections. They have used SIR to delete the names of people who vote for other parties. Let me assert that Congress will stand by each such affected person to ensure that the names are re-enrolled in the electoral roll,” he said, while seeking support for his party.
In Raiganj, Rahul mentioned the deceased Congress leader Priya Ranjan Das Munshi, as it was the latter’s native place. “Had he been alive, he would have been the chief minister of Bengal,” he claimed. “People in Bengal are fed up with both the TMC and the BJP. But the TMC cannot beat the BJP, and only the Congress can. We need Bengal’s support for this change,” Rahul added.
Additional reporting by our Raiganj and Malda correspondents