Too little, too late.

That’s what the Congress and the CPM said to Mamata Banerjee’s Saturday appeal to all anti-BJP forces across India, including Bengal, to set aside differences and close ranks on the BJP as “the first enemy”.

The Congress and the CPM alleged that her call for unity came after spending years sabotaging the INDIA space.

Hours after her protege-turned-nemesis Suvendu Adhikari replaced her as chief minister, the Trinamool Congress chairperson said at a Rabindra Jayanti event at her Kalighat residence that “terror” was now raging in all corners.

“I would like to ask all political parties, student-youth organisations and NGOs to form an alliance. We want to build a platform against the BJP,” said Mamata, who finally updated her socials bio to “Chief Minister of West Bengal (15th, 16th and 17th Vidhan Sabha)”, refusing to add “former” to the description by using the technicality of Suvendu being the chief minister in the 18th Assembly.

Since the results, she had been refusing to resign, claiming she had not lost because the mandate was allegedly stolen by the BJP-Election Commission-central forces clique.

Trinamool received 2.6 crore votes and its hill ally, the BGPM, received 1.76 lakh votes. The Congress received 18.85 lakh votes, while the Left secured 42.9 lakh votes. Hypothetically taken together, they got 3.23 crore votes, 31.4 lakh more than the BJP’s 2.92 crore votes.

“Left, ultra-Left, any national party... wherever they are, let us form an alliance. Anybody can talk to me if they like. I will be in my office daily, from 4pm to 6pm. The BJP is our first enemy,” she added. “Standing in front of Rabindranath, I make this appeal to everyone. Now is not the time to think about who I am and who is who. Not the time for ‘enemy’s enemy is my friend’. Politically, the first enemy is the BJP.”

Mamata alleged that “outside goons” were being brought in to torture the people of Bengal, and her home and nephew Abhishek Banerjee’s home were being specifically targeted for hooliganism.

She alleged that “unbridled terror” had been unleashed on the Trinamool ecosystem since the results.

“A lot of benojol (polluted floodwater) has entered. The police are completely silent,” Mamata said, claiming a sharp contrast between what had taken place when she ascended to power in 2011 and now.

“I did not allow anyone to be tortured. I had sent my bulletproof car to Buddhadeb (Bhattacharjee) Babu. I had given him Z+ security,” she said.

“They (the BJP) withdrew all our security from the day they won, day and night,” Mamata said. “The day before yesterday, I was surprised. I saw that my phone was not receiving calls, messages were not coming.... After that, I saw that the Internet itself had been withdrawn. They could have informed me even an hour earlier. I want them to withdraw (everything). I don’t want to take their mercy. I don’t want anyone’s charity. I don’t want anyone’s sympathy.”

Once again, she claimed Trinamool actually won the election, which would be proven in the future.

“Soniaji (Gandhi), Rahul Gandhi, (Mallikarjun) Khargeji have spoken to me. Uddhav Thackeray, Tejashwi (Yadav) have sent messages. Akhilesh (Yadav) himself has come. Apart from this, starting from Hemant Soren, nobody (from the INDIA space) is left (to contact her). Arvind (Kejriwal) said our defeat caused him greater pain than his own,” she claimed, suggesting the Congress, Shiv Sena-UBT, RJD, Samajwadi Party, JMM, and AAP stood in solidarity with her.

Congress leader Soumya Aich Roy said Mamata should have remembered such things before sending Suvendu, then in her party, as her enforcer-in-chief to finish the Left and the Congress in their areas of strength across the state, by engineering defections in 2016-17. “The proverbial cat climbs the tree only under duress,” he said. “She has never been sincere in fighting the RSS-BJP, and kept weakening INDIA at every opportunity. She brought in and established the BJP in Bengal. Now that her own palace has been razed to the ground, she suddenly remembers us. We, Madam, are not in the habit of opportunistic flip-flops.”

Asked to respond to Mamata’s claims that Sonia, Rahul, and Kharge have been in direct touch with her, Aich Roy said: “We have no such information.”

CPM central committee Sujan Chakraborty, in a virtual echo, asked: “Does she have any credibility in this?”

Chief minister Suvendu, when asked to respond to Mamata’s claims, said: “She is politically irrelevant. I do not wish to comment on the politically irrelevant.”