200-plus seats, 200-plus, 200-plus…. Amit Shah had only one refrain on his lips till the last vote was done and dusted in Bengal.
A little over three weeks later, the vanquished soothsayer and the 200-plus-seat victor came face to face on screen on Monday.
This time, it was Mamata Banerjee’s turn to discuss numbers. And Shah opted to switch focus from the inexact art of prophecy to the virtues of what he referred to as “science”.
The Bengal chief minister asked the Union home minister why the Centre was allotting just over Rs 400 crore as an advance to Bengal to battle Cyclone Yaas while Odisha and Andhra Pradesh were being given over Rs 600 crore each.
Mamata underscored that she was not opposed to the “sister states” getting the assistance, but was only objecting to the Narendra Modi government’s alleged step-motherly treatment of Bengal.
At a virtual meeting convened by Shah with the chief ministers of Bengal, Andhra Pradesh and Odisha and the lieutenant governor of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands on their preparedness to tackle the cyclone’s impact, Mamata asked him to explain the disparity in the central grants.
“They said they would give us ‘full cooperation’, but when they announced the money — as advance of what is already the states’ right, it is not that they are giving anything separately, additionally — they said Odisha was being given Rs 600-odd crore, Andhra Pradesh also will get around Rs 600 crore, and Bengal, they said Rs 400… something… crore,” Mamata said after the meeting.
“Then, I asked Amit Shahji, ‘Why this discrimination? Bengal is a big state… I do not compare. Odisha and Andhra Pradesh are my sister states… I don’t have any problem, you give money to them. But can you compare Uttar Pradesh to Puducherry? There are so many big states, so many small states, so many medium states. It all depends on the population, its density, geography, history, the boundaries’,” she added.
The Bengal chief minister, who had a packed schedule on Monday, initially had no plan to attend the meeting with Shah, and chief secretary Alapan Bandyopadhyay was slated to lead the team representing the state. But Mamata made time, presumably to pre-empt attempts by the BJP and its government to accuse her of non-cooperation.
Mamata Banerjee PTI
“So, I raised my point. Mr Home Minister said: ‘Mamataji, hum baad mein baat karengey. Yeh scientific view sey hota hai, science sey hota hai (Mamata, we will talk later. This happens from a scientific viewpoint, this happens from science)’,” Mamata told journalists at Nabanna.
The chief minister said: “I didn’t say anything more about that then. I have some knowledge of political science. But I have limited knowledge of this ‘science’.”
Asked if the other states with governments deemed friendly towards the BJP were being preferred for political reasons, Mamata said: “See, I have said what I had to. For now, I’m not going to say more.”
Task force
Mamata announced that chief secretary Bandyopadhyay, who was granted a three-month extension beyond his scheduled retirement this month, would head a special, high-powered task force for implementation of three key promises in Trinamul’s election manifesto, which were endorsed by the state cabinet on Monday.
The task force, she said, would oversee the seamless implementation of the universal basic income scheme for a woman per family, the credit card scheme for soft loans of up to Rs 10 lakh to students after Class XII and the Duare Ration project.
