The Communist Party of India (Marxist), along with the Maoists, was conspiring to kill her; they had orchestrated the protests during her visit to Kamduni village two days ago, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee alleged on Wednesday.
Even the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) were not spared her tirade. The CPI(M) was in league with them in plotting “to take away the democratic rights of the people of Bengal by killing me,” she said.
Ms. Banerjee, who had met with protests by local residents after a visit to the village where she had briefly called on the family of a college student gang-raped and murdered earlier this month, said that those who had encountered her there were “outsiders.”
She had recognised the presence of activists of the CPI(M) and those belonging to certain Maoist outfits “by the way they were dressed.” Had she not spotted them “none would have known they were there,” the Trinamool Congress chairperson told a rally at Chandpara in the Bongaon area of North 24 Parganas district marking the start of her election campaign in support of the nominees of her party for the upcoming rural polls.
Villagers at Kamduni who drew Ms. Banerjee’s ire and were accused by her of being with the CPI(M) when trying to express their grievances during her visit there, were no less resentful of being labelled Maoists this time around. Some were even apprehensive of reprisals.
An incensed Biman Bose, State Secretary of the CPI(M), rubbished the charge that his party was conspiring to kill her.
The allegations were of someone “in the habit of lying and speaking nonsense” said Mr. Bose, adding that Ms. Banerjee always accused the CPI(M) for everything for “she is suffering from CPI(M)-phobia..
In a scathing attack against the CPI(M), Ms. Banerjee told the election rally that though it claimed to be Leftist, the party had “no programme but one: kill Mamata Banerjee and return to power.”
Claiming that her party had kept its word and not sought revenge against its opponents after coming to power two years ago, she blamed the CPI(M), the Congress and the BJP for inciting violence across the State. Cautioning them against the “politics of killing” she said that the “people would respond through the democratic process” in the coming polls.
