On the second day of his three-day trip to Bengal, national President of Bharatiya Janata Party, Amit Shah, hit out at the Mamata Banerjee-led West Bengal government, saying that Bengal had the most number of political victims.
"I have heard of political violence here, but when I interacted with them, I realised that political violence of this magnitude is nowhere else in the world. Their family members have been killed. People have got broken limbs, their houses have been razed and all for daring to support a political party that is not the ruling party. Is this Rabindranath Tagore and Vivekananda's Bengal?" Shah said after after the interaction with the affected families.
He warned that the cadres of TMC who rain such cruelty should remember that it was the same attitude of the Left Front towards the Opposition that had brought their downfall. "People had voted you to power with the hope that you would be different from your predecessor. If you think that your torture will shake the BJP and they will leave the party then you are wrong," he added.
In the second half, during another round of interaction with intellectuals, he said that the Modi-government was strong enough to take decisions which were good for the people and not those which would help in appeasement. "I admit that there have been problems owing to demonetisation, but that was necessary to curb black money. Similarly, implementation of GST, coming down on shell companies and other steps too were necessary," Shah explained.
Continuing his tirade against Banerjee, he said that there had been a manifold rise in the grant from Centre to the state and several welfare schemes, but insisted that they never reached the intended beneficiaries. "Previously, Bengal used to receive R1,32,783 crore in grant from the Centre. The BJP-government has given R3,59, 406 crore in the last three years. Won't you ask Mamata where all the money went? She should be held accountable for the money that has been channelled to syndicates," Shah alleged.
Later, state education minister Dr Partha Chatterjee said that it was ironic that the BJP president was talking about political vindictiveness. "He belongs to the same party which, when unable to defeat TMC politically, has unleashed the Central agencies after TMC leaders to implicate them in false cases. He is the one who is instigating people into violence behind closed doors," Chatterjee said.
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