Bengal polls: Mamata likens Modi, Shah to grotesque Ravan, overweight monster

KOLKATA: Barely 24 hours after the CBI grilled the wife of her nephew Abhishek Banerjee in connection with a coal pilferage case, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Wednesday launched a personal attack on Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah.

While addressing a rally at Hooghly’s Dunlop ground, the same venue from where the PM lashed out at the TMC government two days ago, the CM compared Modi with grotesque and Ravan and Shah with an overweight potbelly man and a monster.

"I don’t want to malign the post of the Prime Minister. But two men from Delhi are visiting Bengal and misleading people in Bengal. One is Hodolkutkut (an overweight potbelly man) and the other is kimbhutkimakar (grotesque)," said Mamata Banerjee.

A few days ago, Mamata termed Shah as nadusnudus (an overweight child).

Mamata Banerjee linked CBI’s interrogation of Abhishek’s wife Rujira to BJP’s conspiracy to defame Bengal’s women and daughters. "She (Rujira) is a 22-year-old young lady who has no involvement in the case. Putting the daughter-in-law of a family under the scanner of a law enforcing agency is an insult of Bengal’s women.

"You are using the central agency to defame the women and daughters of Bengal. You (Modi and Shah) are raising a voice against coal smuggling, but you are roaming with coal smugglers and staying in a hotel in Burdwan owned by a coal mafia. I know everything but not dropping his name," she hit back.

A team of eight CBI sleuths interrogated Rujira at her south Kolkata residence for one-and-a-half-hour on Tuesday. The CBI officials entered the apartment minutes after Mamata Banerjee paid an unscheduled visit there.        

She said the Centre is privatising the government agencies and selling out PSUs. "Two persons are running the country. One is Ravan and another is a danav (monster)."   

Retaliating Modi’s attack on the issue of lack of industrialisation in Bengal, Mamata used the venue, the ground of the closed Dunlop factory, as her political tool. "In 2016, we wrote letters to the Centre expressing the state government’s interest to take over the Dunlop and Jessop factories. But till date, there is no response from your end. The central government is responsible for the plight of the workers of the two factories. We are giving Dunlop workers a monthly grant. What have you done for them? Nothing," she said.

On Modi’s labelling of the TMC as an outfit of extortionists, the CM said, "If the poor take Rs 5, they are tolabaj (extortionist). And your party is draining out thousands of crores. Have you waived farmers' loan? No. But, you allowed the defaulters of thousands of crores of bank loans to go scot-free."