Mamata Banerjee declines invite to speak at Cambridge

Trinamool Congress chief and Union railways minister Mamata Banerjee is so preoccupied with West Bengal that she has turned down an invite to speak at the UK’s Cambridge University.

On Friday, she declined an invitation from the British government to be the chief guest at the inauguration of new faculty at the Cambridge University on October 25, 2010. The official reason for rejecting the offer is “her pre-occupation in West Bengal in the backdrop continuing violence here by the ruling Left Front.”

Apart from playing chief guest at the inauguration of the new faculty, Mamata was supposed to deliver a lecture on the political and economic scenario in developing countries. She was also due to meet the British transport minister and survey their railway system.

Incidentally, on October 22, Mamata’s arch-rival, CPI(M) general secretary Prakash Karat will deliver a lecture at the university’s Centre of South Asian Studies on British historian Victor Gordon Kiernan’s ties with communists.