West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Wednesday, 15 December, declared that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will be defeated in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, meeting the same fate it did in the last assembly polls in the state.
"I want to see the BJP lose across the country in the 2024 elections. It will be Khela Hobey again", the Trinamool Congress (TMC) supremo said while addressing a rally for the 19 December Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) election, NDTV reported.
Remarking on the West Bengal election campaign that went parallel to the second wave of the pandemic in March-April this year, Banerjee added, "During the assembly polls, we have seen the campaign that the BJP had unleashed in the state. Everybody was afraid of it. But the people of the state defeated them. Bengal is a place of communal harmony.”
“What Bengal thinks today, India thinks tomorrow. We will defeat the BJP in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls. It will meet the same fate as it had faced in the last assembly polls," she further said.
This was Banerjee’s first public function since her return from Goa. The TMC is trying to expand its footprint on a national scale, gearing up to contest the assembly elections in Goa and Tripura, due in 2022 and 2023 respectively.
Reacting to her statement, BJP's West Bengal president Sukanta Majumdar said that Banerjee's prime ministerial aspirations is a daydream.
"She had said similar things in 2014 and in 2019 and all of us have seen the results," he was quoted as saying.
Meanwhile, while addressing the rally, Banerjee gave a call for a "corruption-free" civic body and also announced that several sitting councillors were being dropped for "non-performance."
She was quoted as saying, "The MPs and MLAs cannot do everything. People's representatives mainly do the work of an area. The councillor has to fulfil his responsibilities. If you don't work, you have to step down. If people come to you with a problem and you sit over it or seek money, it is unacceptable," NDTV reported.
The TMC had won 126 out of the 144 seats in the last KMC polls held in 2015, while it had retained 87 sitting councillors and had dropped 39.
(With inputs from NDTV.)
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