Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to Malda in West Bengal, where he was to attend the foundation stone-laying ceremony of a Centrally-funded engineering institute, on March 26 has been put off.
The District Magistrate of Malda, Sridhar Kumar Ghosh, told on Saturday that he had received a fax message from the Director, Special Protection Group (SPG), last night saying the “proposed visit of the Prime Minister to Malda in West Bengal on March 26 has been postponed”.
No reason was cited for the postponement, Mr. Ghosh said.
Congress MP and Malda district Congress president Abu Hashem Khan Chowdhury, who is the brother of late Congress leader Ghani Khan Chowdhury, had told reporters in Malda on Friday that Trinamool Congress Chief Mamata Banerjee was not welcome to the event.
“We are against Mamata accompanying the PM on his Malda visit as her ministry has deliberately ignored Malda in the railway budget,” he said.
Mamata Banerjee had said here on March 18 that the Prime Minister would visit Malda on March 26 to lay the foundation stone of the institute at Sujapur in Malda named after Ghani Khan Chowdhury.
She had said that she would attend the programme along with the Union finance minister Pranab Mukherjee.
