KOLKATA: West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Thursday said she and her counterparts in neighbouring Bihar and Jharkhand will join hands with several other opposition leaders to oust the BJP from power in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.
Addressing a party programme here, Banerjee, also the Trinamool Congress supremo, claimed that the BJP would face a rout as people were displeased with the saffron party-led Centre's policies.
"There is Nitish Kumar in Bihar, Akhilesh Yadav in Uttar Pradesh, Hemant Soren in Jharkhand. We will all unite and defeat the BJP in 2024. Opposition parties will join hands to defeat the BJP. All of us will be on one side and the BJP on the other. The BJP's arrogance, its hope of bagging 300 seats will be its nemesis. 'Khela Hobe' in 2024," she said.
'Khela Hobe' (game to be played) had been the battle cry of the TMC during the Assembly polls last year, in which the party defeated the BJP to storm back to power for the third consecutive term.
"The ground for 'Khela Hobe' in 2024 will be prepared in Bengal itself. The BJP will lose 100 seats in these five states I named. They should remember that during Rajiv Gandhi's tenure, Congress had over 400 seats, yet they lost the next elections. BJP leaders' assertion that it would bag 300 seats will also bite the dust," she said.
Banerjee insisted that the "arrest of Jharkhand MLAs with hordes of cash by the Bengal police recently" had stopped horse-trading in the neighbouring state and prevented the fall of the Hemant Soren government.
Three Congress MLAs of Jharkhand were arrested on July 30 after nearly Rs 49 lakh in cash was found in the car that was intercepted at Panchla in West Bengal's Howrah district.
The Congress, a part of the JMM-led government in Jharkhand, claimed that the BJP was trying to topple the Soren government by offering Rs 10 crore each and ministerial berths to the MLAs.
"The BJP thinks they can threaten us with CBI and ED. The more they pursue such tricks, the more they will get closer to defeat in next year's panchayat election and 2024 Lok Sabha polls," she said.
The CM slammed the opposition, especially the BJP, and a section of the media for allegedly unleashing a malicious campaign against her and her party leaders following the arrest of senior leaders Partha Chatterjee and Anubrata Mondal by central agencies in different cases.
Meanwhile, rebuffing Banerjee's claims, BJP state president Sukanta Majumdar said the TMC supremo should stop "daydreaming".
"We have seen TMC's national overdrive in 2014 and 2019. It's high time that the party learns its lessons," he said.