On a day the Election Commission of India issued a show cause notice to Congress leader Rahul Gandhi for his ‘panauti’ barb on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, his colleague in the INDIA Opposition bloc, Mamata Banerjee echoed the tone to call the top BJP leader a “Papisthya” (sinner), without naming him while perceptively also tagging home minister Amit Shah under the same adjective.
“If India played the (ICC men’s world cup) finals at the Eden Gardens or at the Wankhede stadium (in Mumbai), we would have won,” Banerjee said at the Netaji Indoor Stadium in Calcutta on Thursday while addressing a political meeting of party workers and leaders.
“Our boys were playing so well. They were winning every match. But the moment the sinners landed up at the stadium, the team fell flat,” she declared. “That’s the result of trying to act extra-clever,” she added.
“As the saying goes, sins don’t spare even your own father,” the Bengal chief minister continued with her verbal punches aimed at the BJP top brass.
The jibes from both Opposition leaders, though replete with latent political innuendos, perhaps wasn’t a serious commentary on the correlation between Prime Minister’s presence at the venue of the World Cup finals in Ahmedabad and India’s loss. But political observers felt that Banerjee echoing Gandhi’s sentiments could be a message of partnership for her co-leader in the pan-India Opposition platform, especially since she chose not to utter a word against the Congress in her speech in which she took on the both the BJP as well as the CPI-M with equal vigour.
“Our boys and girls are great in their sporting skills. But they have been forced to wear saffron (sports jerseys). Even they tried to force our boys to wear saffron instead of their blue jerseys during the match. That move was resisted by the players themselves. Still they sprinkled a bit of saffron in their blue shirts,” Banerjee said, condemning the alleged efforts to colour sports with political symbols in line with her irritation with orange practice jerseys of the Indian cricket team.
On Tuesday, Gandhi, during a poll speech in Rajasthan, had used the word, 'panauti', suggesting PM Modi's presence at the stadium was unlucky for Team India during the finals in which the Boys in Blue lost to Australia after 10 consecutive wins in the tournament.
Like Banerjee, Gandhi too never referred to the Prime Minister directly. But on Thursday, Banerjee went a step ahead to draw correlations between the Prime Minister’s virtual presence at ISRO’s Chandrayaan III moon landing moment and its spacecraft’s Vikram lander module failure to wake up from its cryogenic sleep following its dormancy during the sunless fortnight on the moon’s south pole. “Wherever sinners go, they bring upon disaster,” Banerjee said.
