Kolkata, April 1 – The Trinamool Congress and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee are more concerned about "illegal Muslim infiltrators" rather than "Bengalis and Hindu Bengalis," the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) claimed on Wednesday.
The BJP also criticised the Trinamool Congress for allegedly describing Indian tennis star Leander Paes as an "outsider" after Paes joined the BJP on Tuesday at the party's national headquarters in New Delhi.
Amit Malviya, the head of the BJP's Information Technology Cell and the party's central observer for West Bengal, issued a social media statement where he launched a scathing attack against the Trinamool Congress and the Chief Minister on both issues.
"The Trinamool has a problem with Bengalis and Hindu Bengalis in particular. Yesterday, they called Leander Paes, a son of the soil, an outsider, forcing him to emphasize that he is proud to be a descendant of Michael Madhusudan Dutt, a true nationalist who made immense contributions to Bengali and Indian literature," Malviya said about the Leander Paes issue.
In the same post, Malviya also raised the issue of the letter written by Mamata Banerjee to the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC), Gyanesh Kumar, where she accused the Election Commission of India (ECI) and the BJP of attempting to enrol voters from other states in the voter list of West Bengal through mass submissions of Form-6 applications, which are used for new voter enrolment.
"Now, even the Chief Minister is writing to the Election Commission, questioning the efforts of Bengalis to appeal the deletion of their names from the voter list as unconstitutional. Mamata Banerjee draws a large part of her mandate from illegal Muslim infiltrators and is willing to go to any length to protect them. This includes going to the Supreme Court and even ridiculing Hindu Bengalis as outsiders. People will speak at the ballot," Malviya said in his social media post.
In another social media post, also issued on Wednesday morning, Malviya launched a scathing attack on the West Bengal government over the current crisis faced by potato farmers in the state. The farmers have been forced to sell their products at distress prices.
"West Bengal, once a leader in potato production and a backbone of agricultural strength, is today witnessing a heartbreaking decline. The condition of Bengal's farmers is nothing short of tragic. Bengal's farmers are being forced to sell their hard-earned produce at as low as ₹1 per kg, an amount that doesn't even cover their basic cost of cultivation," Malviya said in his X post.