Will resign if proven I dialled Shah over TMC’s national status: Mamata Banerjee

Mamata Banerjee said she will resign if it is proven that she dialled Home Minister Amit Shah after the Trinamool Congress lost the national party status

Kolkata: West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Wednesday said she will resign if it is proven that she dialled Union Home Minister Amit Shah after the Trinamool Congress lost the national party status.

Banerjee, who was speaking to reporters at West Bengal’s state secretariat, said that her party’s name will remain the All India Trinamool Congress.

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“I will resign if it is proven that I called up Amit Shah over TMC’s national party status,” she said, rejecting Bengal’s leader of opposition Suvendu Adhikari’s claim that she had made the call.

Adhikari on Tuesday claimed that Banerjee had dialled Shah after the Election Commission revoked TMC’s national party status to request him to repeal the decision.

Banerjee, also the TMC supremo, said, “It was the norm to review the national party status of all parties after 10 years. That would mean the next review should have been in 2026 … But they did it in 2019.”

“My party’s name will remain the ‘All India Trinamool Congress’. If the BJP has any problem, they can approach the Election Commission and we will approach the common people,” she thundered.
The ECI withdrew the national party status of the TMC, Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and the Communist Party of India (CPI) last week.

Reacting to Adhikari’s assertion, TMC on Tuesday also said there is not even an iota of truth in it.
“Suvendu Adhikari is a habitual liar. We have seen how he has earlier brazenly lied about several political developments. Having a national party status or not is notional, it does not impact the growth of the TMC,” party spokesperson Kunal Ghosh had said.

Taking on the BJP, Banerjee claimed that it will not be able to get more than 200 seats in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.

The chief minister said that the state administration will look into the missing complaint filed by veteran politician Mukul Roy’s son Subhrangshu about his father.

Roy, who his family says is suffering from dementia and Parkinson’s disease, surfaced dramatically in Delhi after the missing person complaint was filed, and claimed that he is a “BJP MP and MLA” and wants to meet Amit Shah.

“Mukul Roy is BJP’s MLA, it’s his affair if he wants to go to Delhi,” Banerjee said.

Roy had won the 2021 West Bengal assembly elections on a BJP ticket after defecting from TMC, but had later crossed back to the party he helped found complaining of ill-treatment at the hands of the saffron party’s leadership.