KOLKATA: Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee on Tuesday said the BJP was in power at the Centre because there was no alternative and the saffron camp would be ousted the day people found a viable alternative force.
The CM also made it clear that the TMC would emerge as the only alternative force that can challenge the BJP in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
"The BJP is still in power as there is no alternative. The day there is one, it will be ousted. The TMC will emerge as the only alternative force in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections," said Mamata while addressing the party’s organisational meet.
On recent occasions, she took a potshot at the Congress saying the UPA no longer exists. Mamata also urged to form an alliance of the Opposition parties which would not be led by the Congress. She never missed a chance to portray her party as the only alternative of the BJP after TMC’s thumping victory in the recent Assembly elections in Bengal.
Mamata, who was re-elected as the chairperson of the party, formed a new state committee comprising mostly of her loyalists.
The reshuffle was done amid an apparent power tussle in the party between the old guard and the next generation leaders who are known as followers of Mamata’s nephew Abhishek Banerjee.
Developments within the BJP ahead of the just-concluded civic polls suggested the difference between Mamata and Abhishek, who is the national general secretary of the party, as the TMC supremo preferred to keep faith on her loyalists and the latter wanted to bring fresh and new faces in the fray of the municipal elections. In a recent reshuffle in the national level hierarchy, Mamata had clipped Abhishek’s wings by appointing three inductees as national vice-presidents.
The BJP on Tuesday continued facing defection as Jay Prakash Majumdar, the party’s former vice-president of the Bengal chapter who was suspended for expressing his discontent, joined the TMC in presence of Mamata and she inducted him as the party’s state unit vice-president.
Majumdar joined the TMC after holding a meeting with BJP’s Hooghly MP and general secretary Locket Chatterjee, who raised the issue of self-assessment for the poor show in the recent civic polls in BJP’s introspection meeting on Saturday.