Didi piles CAA heat on ‘cheat’ party - Signs of BJP disquiet in Matua belt

BJP MP of Bongaon Santanu Thakur (right) at the meeting of the Matua community in Raiganj on Monday.: Kousik Sen

Meghdeep Bhattacharyya And Kousik Sen   |   TT   |   Calcutta/Raiganj   |  22.12.20  : Mamata Banerjee on Monday called the BJP “a cheatingbaaj party (a party of cheats)” over Amit Shah’s apparent shifting of the goalpost on the citizenship matrix and spoke against any of its three components getting implemented in Bengal.

On Sunday, the Union home minister had said the rules of the amended Act were yet to be framed because of the Covid-19 pandemic and the process would start once vaccinations began. On a nationwide NRC, he said: “Let the first step happen.”

A day later on Monday, the Bengal chief minister told the media at the state secretariat that BJP leaders could do or say “anything” for politics. “The BJP is a cheatingbaaj party. In English, we say cheater. The politics of the BJP leaders is that for politics they can do anything, say anything.”

“Since they passed the CAA, we have been opposing…. They cannot decide the fate of the citizens. Let them decide their own fate. We are against the CAA, the NPR, the NRC. None of those has been withdrawn yet…. We will keep fighting the battle and not allow anybody to go out of this country,” said the Trinamul chief amid signs of the movement against the citizenship tripod making a resurgence.

Before Lok Sabha polls last year, the then proposed CAA was a plank from which the BJP sought votes from many, including the Matuas. The Matuas, lower-caste Hindu refugees from Bangladesh, determine the electoral outcome in at least 30 Assembly seats and two Lok Sabha seats of Bengal.

Now, with Matuas getting restless over the delay in the CAA’s implementation, BJP national general-secretary and Bengal minder Kailash Vijayvargiya had earlier this month promised it would be implemented from January.

On Monday, BJP’s Bongaon MP Santanu Thakur said in Raiganj that Shah should clarify to the Matuas what its plans on the CAA were. “It is important that the Act is implemented before state elections. Any delay in the process will have its… bad effect,” said Thakur, reacting to Shah’s remarks that were a departure from Vijayvargiya’s “January” promise.

Mamata in her response to the issue iterated on Monday: “The Matuas, for instance… they are already, very much, citizens of this country.”

Mocking Shah, she said: “Sonar Bangla (Shah’s promise for the state)… does he know what sona (gold) is, what rupo (silver) is, what tama (copper) is? I hope he knows the meaning of armoury, arms, riots, communal, secular?”

“Most of the things he said yesterday, total lies, garbage of lies. I will issue a point-by-point rebuttal tomorrow (Tuesday),” she added. “Speaking for a political party, it does not behove a Union home minister to furnish falsities as facts. I would request Amitji, you are the Union home minister. This does not look nice, if you peddle the lies prepared by the party without fact-checking…”

On Shah’s defence of his ministry’s transfer of three IPS officers from Bengal in the wake of an attack on BJP chief J.P. Nadda’s convoy, Mamata said: “...From my limited experience as a seven-term MP and two-term CM... there is a Constitution and there is a convention. Such provisions are applied only in times of Emergency,” she said. “Have they announced such a super Emergency in Bengal?” They want to scare officers and we will not cower before them, she said.

Resignation accepted

Speaker Biman Banerjee said on Monday that he had accepted Nandigram MLA Suvendu Adhikari’s resignation as the latter had submitted the letter conforming to rules.