Trinamul Congress chairperson Mamata Banerjee on Sunday told her party colleagues in Murshidabad that Narendra Modi and the BJP wanted to keep Rahul Gandhi as the foremost leader in the Opposition because he made the Prime Minister look good.

“The BJP is not letting the Parliament function in order to establish Rahul Gandhi as the foremost leader in the national Opposition space. If Rahul Gandhi remains that leader, nobody would ever be able to defeat Narendra Modi because Rahul is Modi’s biggest TRP (a metric that signifies a programme’s success on television) or at least everybody says so,” the Bengal chief minister told the Murshidabad district Trinamul leaders over the phone.

While the conversation was on, the district leaders’ phone was on speaker and journalists were around.

Mamata had said something similar during her party’s closed-door meeting at her residence on Friday, but Sunday’s statements were meant for public consumption.

“Or else, somebody (Rahul) has said something outside (India, in the UK), over that the Parliament is being held to ransom. We want the Parliament to function, we want discussions therein on the Adani issue,” said Mamata, on a day Delhi police paid a visit to Rahul, seeking answers on questions raised in the context of an investigation pertaining to his remarks during the Bharat Jodo Yatra.

“Why is that not happening? Why are key issues, such as fuel price rise, uniform civil code, not being discussed?” she asked.

“We fought against the citizenship matrix and did not let it get implemented, similarly, we will not let them get away with the uniform civil code. Minorities are fully safe with us, they love us.”

On Friday, Mamata hosted Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav for a meeting at her Kalighat residence, while her party announced the likelihood of her meeting BJD chief Naveen Patnaik on March 23, besides plans of a trip to Delhi soon.

The meeting took place against the backdrop of Akhilesh’s formal declaration of the SP intent to maintain equidistance from the BJP and the Congress. Trinamul’s leader in the Lok Sabha Sudip Bandyopadhyay essentially made the same point that day.

On Sunday, Akhilesh said in Calcutta that the BJP would be politically finished in the future, “much like the Congress”, for allegedly misusing central agencies against the Opposition.

Seniors in the Trinamul parliamentary party have said Mamata believes it is possible to drag the BJP’s Lok Sabha tally down to less than 130 if the Congress sacrifices its leadership role to back an Opposition roundtable, with due importance to the regional forces.

Mamata also touched on the issue of the Trinamul’s abstention from voting against former Bengal governor Jagdeep Dhankhar in the Vice-Presidential election, saying her participation would not have made a difference to the outcome.

In the context of her party’s “shock” defeat in the hands of the Congress in Murshdiabad’s Sagardighi, Mamata alleged a lot of money was at play, and the electorate was misled in a number of ways.

“The Congress, the CPM, and the BJP hatched a well-planned conspiracy to misdirect the people against Trinamul,” she said.

“Their man here (AdhirRanjan Chowdhury) is the Number One man of the BJP, and together with the RSS and the CPM, he has made these things possible. The fight they fought was unethical,” added Mamata. “They are communally instigating people.”

Congress candidate BaironBiswas, backed by the Left, won the Sagardighi Assemblybypoll by a margin of 22,986votes recently, defeating Trinamul’s Debasish Banerjeein a constituency that has around 65 per cent minority population.

Trinamul’s Murshidabad MP Abu Taher Khan asked the chief minister to wait till after Ramzan, and to come down for a “mega rally” in Behrampore, to which she agreed.

Regarding the panchayat polls in the district, she said she would choose the candidates herself.

Chowdhury mocked her inability to get over one by-poll defeat, and accused her of trying to weaken the Congress’sfight to please Modi.

“I am so glad we managed to get under her skin with just that one bypoll victory. I do not have the balm to soothe herSagardighi burns,” said the Congress’s leader in the Lok Sabha.

“Her principal objective now is to get in the way of the Congress fight, to get in the good books of the Prime Minister,” he added.

CPM central committee member Sujan Chakraborty said Mamata should be the last person to bring up ethics in politics and alliances, referring to her past as a BJP ally.