The Hindu : Mamata to wait till Aug 12. on rly. bifurcation issue

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Aug 01, 2002

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Mamata to wait till Aug 12. on rly. bifurcation issue

By Our Special Correspondent

Kolkata July 31. Pressured by party MPs and key functionaries, the Trinamool Congress supremo Mamata Banerjee, said that she would prefer to give the Centre "one more chance" to reconsider the proposal to bifurcate the Eastern Railway.

At a news conference at her south Kolkata residence, Ms. Banerjee said the party working committee which met here during the day reviewed the situation and decided to wait for a while before taking the "drastic step of quitting the NDA".

Ms. Banerjee apparently tried the damage by assuring the NDA leadership that her party would not support the Opposition nominee but stay away from voting in the coming vice-presidential election scheduled for August 12. "We will wait till August 12. By then, if the Centre does not review the bifurcation plan, we will have no option but to quit the alliance,'' Ms Banerjee said.

According to Trinamool sources, Ms. Banerjee is under tremendous pressures from the party MPs and senior leaders to "go slow" on the NDA. They argued that Ms. Banerjee would commit yet another blunder if she snapped her ties with the NDA now. "Our credibility as a political party is rather low at this point in time because of our past actions in regard to the NDA. We cannot afford to be a laughing stock by once again leaving the Alliance on one particular issue,'' many leaders told the Trinamool chief.

The pro-NDA Trinamool MPs also told Ms. Banerjee that the party needed some more time to examine the repercussions any departure from NDA would have. Besides,the party would be required to find out whether the Congress was still keen on having it back as an ally. "The Trinamool cannot survive if it has to fight a hostile NDA, on the one hand and collaborate with an opposition aloof to Trinamool's needs, the other leaders said.

Ms. Banerjee , however, said that she had decided to wait for a few more days only because Mr. Vijay Goel from the Prime Minister's Office and the Defence Minister, George Fernandes, today told her to do so. "They telephoned me to say that I should not do anything drastic as the government is trying to do something about bifrucation,'' she said. Even though Ms. Banerjee restrained herself from making caustic comments about the Deputy Prime Minister, L.K. Advani, she made it clear that her views on the Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and his present position in the Government remained unchanged.Without naming Mr. Advani, she suggested that the power levers were controlled by him and not the Prime Minister.

"We supported the NDA because of the Prime Minister. But the way NDA is running now, we have no doubt that the Prime Minister has no powers,'' Ms. Banerjee commented.

Ms. Banerjee has drawn up an agitation plan, including a Bengal bandh on August 5 and a sit-in-demonstration in front of the Prime Minister's residence in New Delhi on August 12.

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