Even after winning the elections, the political grandstanding and drama of West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee refuses to abate. This time Mamata is upset because Prime Minister Modi treated her like a Chief Minister during a meeting with Chief Ministers and district magistrates to take stock of the virus situation in the country.
Taking time off her busy schedule of spreading terror and fear in the minds of the supporters of BJP workers in West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee finally attended an all Chief Ministers meeting with the Prime Minister.
However, being true to its characteristics, she attempted to score political brownie points by staging a drama and crying fowl for PM Modi’s crime of treating her like a state Chief Minister.
Terming the meeting of Prime Minister Narendra Modi with chief ministers and district magistrates of 10 states on the Covid situation as “casual and super flop”, Mamata claimed that she felt “insulted”.
The West Bengal Chief Minister said, “All the chief ministers were sitting like puppets, and none was allowed to say a single word. We felt insulted. Only four to five district magistrates, mostly from BJP-ruled states, were allowed to speak. The meeting ended with the Prime Minister’s speech, in which he claimed that Covid-19 cases were going down.”
Mamata added that she was running a state “but Delhi’s Shahenshah is not even looking at us and just saying ‘Sab thik hai’ (all is well)”.
Mamata also claimed that only representatives of BJP-ruled states got the chance to speak, however, Bengal LOP Suvendu Adhikari countered her as he said that five of the seven district officials who spoke represented non-BJP states of Chhattisgarh, Kerala, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, and Andhra Pradesh.
5 out of the 7 District Officials who spoke today belonged to non-BJP ruled states of Chhattisgarh, Kerala, Maharashtra, Rajasthan and AP.
Cooperative federalism is the firm commitment of PM @narendramodi unlike CM @MamataOfficial who only believes in confrontational federalism.
— Suvendu Adhikari (Modi Ka Parivar) (@SuvenduWB) May 20, 2021
This meeting was specifically arranged to take stock from the grassroots level something which would be known to the respective District Magistrates and rather than the Chief Ministers who would be able to speak on the macro side of things when it came to their respective states. However, everyone was surprised when Mamata decided to attend the meeting after choosing not to attend multiple earlier meetings.
But it turns out, Mamata’s sole motive to attend the meeting was to score political brownie points. It was almost as if she was being tutored by her colleague Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal as last time around, in a break of the norms, publicly broadcasted a private meeting.
Credit where due, it is heartening to see Mamata Banerjee taking a break from giving a free hand to her alleged goons to wreak havoc in Bengal and instead deciding to politically target PM Modi. This would have saved the lives of hundreds of people in Bengal.