TMC launches campaign to project Mamata Banerjee as next PM

|HT|

Ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, the Trinamool Congress has launched a campaign to project the party’s chief Mamata Banerjee as the next Prime Minister of India. The campaign, in the form of a website named ‘India Wants Mamata Di’, was launched by Derek O’Brien, TMC MP, on Saturday.

With an eye on women voters and to sharpen its ‘insider vs. outsider’ charge against the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the TMC had launched a slogan ‘Bangla Nijer Meyekei Chay’ (Bengal only wants its own daughter), ahead of the 2021 assembly polls.

The TMC returned to power in May 2021 for the third consecutive time after a sweeping victory. The party won 213 seats out of the 292 assembly seats where elections were held. The BJP which had set a target to win more than 200 seats, ended up with only 77.

The website says: “India Wants Mamata Di (IWM) is a community, believing in the ideology of CM of West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee and All India Trinamool Congress, the party that she leads”. “We wish every Indian enjoys the good governance, that has been established by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee through her pro-people policies with the aim of holistic development, by making her the first ever Bengali Prime Minister of the Union of India in 2024, when she completes four decades in electoral politics,” it says.

For a long time, Banerjee has advocated for a third front led by regional satraps to take on the BJP in the 2024 general elections. The TMC, which is on a mission to expand its footprint beyond West Bengal, has already made its intentions clear that it will take on the BJP on the national stage in 2024.

West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee has also written to non-BJP chief ministers and opposition parties accusing the ruling party at the Centre of trying to influence the judiciary. Banerjee had shot off similar letters in the past as well. In April 2021, she urged opposition parties to unite against the BJP, writing letters to top leaders of non-BJP parties in the midst of the West Bengal assembly polls. The BJP took a jibe at the TMC saying that the party always engages in net practice and never gets down in the field to play.

“This is not the first time that they (TMC) are doing such campaigns. They had made similar campaigns in 2014 and 2019. Slogans were also raised to uproot the BJP. Sometimes it was said that Mamata will be the Prime Minister and sometimes it was said that she will be the driving force. Again such claims are being made to raise the political heat. The TMC always does net practice and never gets down to the field to play,” said Samik Bhattacharya, BJP spokesperson.

(Except for the headline and the pictorial description, this story has not been edited by THE DEN staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)