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TMC roasts Centre over ‘late’ Covid-19 response
The TMC also alleged that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union home minister Amit Shah were supervising and controlling “a concerted effort to malign and heckle the Bengal government.
West Bengal’s ruling party Trinamool Congress (TMC) on Wednesday demanded the Rs 20,000 crore Central Vista project in New Delhi be scrapped, alleged that Arogya Setu app was being used for surveillance on people and accused the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government at the Centre of acting late on the Covid-19 crisis.
The party even alleged that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union home minister Amit Shah were supervising and controlling “a concerted effort to malign and heckle the Bengal government.”
Their allegations came amid an unrelenting attack by the BJP on the Mamata Banerjee government over allegations of Covid-19 data fudging, alleged scam in the public distribution system and mismanagement in dealing with the pandemic.
“We demand the Rs 20,000 crore Parliament renovation project be scrapped and the money used for the poor, especially the migrant workers. Of what use would this project be, except for, perhaps, creating an underground way for the Prime Minister to travel from this residence to the Parliament?” said TMC Rajya Sabha leader and national spokesperson Derek O’Brien at an interaction with journalists through video conferencing. .
The party’s Lok Sabha MPs Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar and Sudip Banerjee also took part in the interaction.
Taking a dig at the use of Arogya Setu app, Ghosh Dastidar said, “Instead of the declared purpose of contact tracing, this app is being used for surveillance on people.”
“It is because the Centre was not prepared that the states initially received insufficient testing kits and PPEs. That’s how the containment was affected,” she said.
Sudip Banerjee, the TMC’s leader in the Lok Sabha alleged that central government officials, including those in the inter-ministerial central teams, were “writing like politicians” because they were “merely signing documents drafted by their political masters.”
“There is a concerted effort on behalf of the Centre and BJP to malign and heckle the state and disturb the state’s operations against the pandemic,” Banerjee alleged.
His remarks came in the backdrop of the Centre pulling up the state over the number of issues related to Covid-19 management in the state. These include at least three letters from the Union home ministry and three from the inter-ministerial central teams.
Separately, TMC secretary-general and state education minister Partha Chatterjee alleged that when the world was planning for Covid-19 in February and March, Centre was busy honouring US president Donald Trump in Gujarat and in “horse-trading” in Madhya Pradesh.
“Our party has been raising the issue right from the beginning, sought closure of Parliament sessions at the beginning of March and our chief minister kept demanding that the railways and international flights be stopped. They did not heed and let the virus spread. And when they finally acted, they did not allow lakhs of migrant workers the slightest time to return home. This is nothing but miserable planning,” Chatterjee alleged.
BJP rubbished all charges and said that the state was being led to peril by the Mamata Banerjee government.
“Had Centre not intervened, we the people of the state would have been in a complete mess. If anything changed for the better, it was due to the pressure created by the Centre,” BJP state unit president Dilip Ghosh said.
Responding to TMC’s charge that BJP was indulging in politics in times of a pandemic, Ghosh said, “We are the opposition party. Our role is to highlight where the government is going wrong. We will keep doing it.”
On Tuesday, BJP carried out a silent protest at the compound of all block development offices (BDOs) protesting a scam in ration distribution. Protesters wore masks and stood maintaining distance from each other and carried posters.
