Railway Minister and Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee on Sunday refuted the charges of Left leaders that she was using railway advertisements to project the agenda of her party, and slammed the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and its “politics of destruction,” for converting “democracy into one-party autocracy.”
Defending the plethora of railway advertisements issued, she said it was “the work” her Ministry was doing which was “angering” the Left leadership.
The advertisements were only an announcement of the projects being taken up by the railways.
“The railways are a public-oriented department for which these advertisements are of a regular nature” unlike “yours [the State government's] which is a politics-oriented department” Ms. Banerjee said at the foundation-stone laying ceremony of the new Metro line from Barrackpore to Baranagar at Barrackpore in the State's North 24 Parganas district.
“I will issue advertisements a thousand times…They are for the benefit of passengers; not related to Mamata Banerjee…You [the Left Front] are issuing advertisements for your own publicity,” she alleged.
“You have given us [the Trinamool Congress] 19 MPs; I have so far given you in one-and-a-half years 14 new railway factories and projects that will provide employment to thousands of youth.
“I have just one department [Ministry]; if I had one hundred departments we would have shown you what we are capable of, in contrast to what the Left Front government has failed to provide in 35 years of being in power.”
“For the Left, it is a case of sour grapes,” Ms. Banerjee added.
Accusing the Left leadership of being “two faced – one face in Bengal and another in Delhi,” she demanded a “clarification” on how much it had spent for development in the State rather than directing “all your anger at Mamata Banerjee.”
“Have you set up a single industry? What is there for me to do if you have not? You have not been able to; you have failed. You could not even set up a factory on 600 acres at Singur. I have no objections if you set up factories but you are angry because the railways are. Factories can be set up if there is a desire to do so; they can be set up without bullets and without bulldozers,” she said.
