Dismisses TMC charge that she refused to meet the party’s team in Delhi for talks on MGNREGA dues.
KOLKATA
In an unexpected development that caught the Trinamool Congress off-guard, Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti, the Union Minister of State for Rural Development, on Saturday, landed in Kolkata unannounced and called out the party for “spreading lies” about its ongoing agitation to demand pending Central dues for MGNREGA and Awas Yojana for which the Trinamool Congress has mounted a high-decibel campaign in Delhi and Kolkata.
Addressing a press conference at the State BJP office, Jyoti said that the Trinamool Congress leaders led by MP Abhishek Banerjee who had gone to New Delhi earlier this week “deliberately did not want to meet her and merely wanted to create drama and nautanki”. She dismissed the Trinamool’s allegations that she refused to meet the party’s team in New Delhi for talks regarding MGNREGA dues. She said: “I wanted to meet them and waited for nearly two-and-a-half hours for them. But they kept shifting goalposts on the number of members of their delegation.”
“They are now levelling false allegations that I ran away through the back door. The TMC is spreading lies, they did not want to meet me, they just wanted to create drama,” she claimed.
She refuted the Trinamool charge that the Central Government was adopting a step-motherly attitude regarding non-payment of dues. She also quoted figures to show that in the past nine years, the Central Government grants from her ministry to West Bengal had actually gone up four to six times as compared to the nine years of the UPA Government which preceded it.
She also accused the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress Government of corruption in the implementation of MGNREGA in the State.
She said that there were widespread reports of ghost workers and inflated bills. She said that the Central Government would be compelled to take strict action against the State Government. Abhishek Banerjee, the second-in-command of the Trinamool Congress and Mamata Banerjee’s nephew, denied the allegations of corruption. Banerjee and other party leaders who have been sitting in dharna in front of the gates of the Raj Bhavan in Kolkata for the past two days said that the party was committed to the welfare of MGNREGA workers and was taking all necessary steps to ensure that they get their dues.
Earlier this week, Abhishek Banerjee and party MLAs, MPs and Ministers, along with those engaged in MGNREGA work, had staged a protest at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi and marched to the Rural Development Ministry at Krishi Bhawan, where they were scheduled to meet Jyoti. However, after around an hour-and-a-half, the TMC leaders claimed that the Minister refused to meet them, restricting the number of members in the delegation to five.
Mahua Moitra of the Trinamool Congress called Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti a “liar” even as Abhishek Banerjee started an indefinite sit-in from Thursday in front of Raj Bhavan, the official residence of the West Bengal Governor CV Ananda Bose.
“This is going to continue till we get our dues. We started it in Delhi and we are continuing it in Bengal. We are waiting for the Governor to come back. So, we will wait. We are very patient,” Mahua Moitra told reporters at the dharna site.
Hitting out at the Minister of State for Rural Development, the TMC MP said: “Sadhvi Niranjan is a liar and I already said it on record. She gave us an appointment. It was not possible for us to enter the Krishi Bhavan without an appointment. There were 40 of us. We waited, but she refused to meet. She refused to meet the victims’ families. She called them janata (public). I want to ask her a question: if janata didn’t vote for you, how are you sitting there? She is one of the biggest BJP liars I have ever seen.”