Whenever an issue is raised by an Indian citizen, Prime Minister advises the person to go to Pakistan, to divert attention from the growing economic crisis in the country, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said on Friday.
Ms. Banerjee was addressing a rally against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) 2019, and the proposed National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Siliguri in north Bengal on Friday.
‘Talk about India’
“If someone asks for a job and says [he] has no work, PM [Prime Minister] asks the person to go to Pakistan. If someone says we don't have an industry, he tells them to go to Pakistan. Pakistan can talk about itself, as much as it wants; [we] should talk about India. This is our motherland, all of us were born here,” Ms Banerjee said.
Her remarks are a response to Mr Modi’s comments on Thursday asking the Congress and its allies to raise their voice against Pakistan’s atrocities on its minorities for the past 70 years, rather than the CAA.
Ms. Banerjee also criticised the Prime Minister for “frequently comparing India with Pakistan” and wondered if Mr. Modi is “Ambassador of Hindustan or the neighbouring country.”
“India is a big country with a rich culture and heritage. Why does the PM regularly compare our nation with Pakistan? Are you the Prime Minister of India or the Ambassador of Pakistan,” the Trinamool chief said. Indicating that the Prime Minister’s responses were a strategy to divert attention from slow economic growth, Ms Banerjee said, “We don't want to be Pakistan. We love Hindustan.”
Deliberate confusion
The Chief Minister accused the BJP of “deliberately” creating confusion over the implementation of NRC, saying its leaders have been making contradictory statements on the issue.
“On one hand, Prime Minister says that there will be no NRC; on the other, the Union Home Minister and other BJP ministers claim the exercise will be conducted across the country.”
Talking about police action during the anti-CAA protests in Uttar Pradesh, which claimed several lives, Ms. Banerjee, in an apparent reference to her counterpart Yogi Adityanath, said, “those who cannot rule are governing major States.”
Dubbing her fight against the CAA as the “second war of Independence”, she said the BJP knows “how to divide the nation on the basis of religion.”
“But my religion is to defend the freedom of people. We have to save the country from bigotry,” she added.
(With inputs from PTI).
