Kalyan Banerjee met Gandhi and a few other Congress MPs outside the Makar Dwar of Parliament, where he has been staging a one-man protest wearing a poster around his neck with photographs of 20 rebel Trinamool Congress (TMC) MPs after his suspension from the Lok Sabha for allegedly using derogatory language against a few dissident TMC MPs.
Seeing the photographs on the poster with the headline “Lok Sabha mein Bangal ka 20 Gaddar” (20 traitors from Bengal in Lok Sabha), a visibly amused Gandhi told Banerjee that some of the rebel MPs had first left the Congress to join the TMC before leaving the Mamata Banerjee-led party to join the Nationalist Citizens Party of India (NCPI) last month.
The TMC leader, known to be a Mamata Banerjee loyalist, said they (some rebels) had left the Congress in 2014 as the party had very little presence in West Bengal.
“They won on our party’s ticket,” he said.
When Independent MP Pappu Yadav (Rajesh Ranjan), who was with the Congress MPs, said that after all, they were originally Congress members, Kalyan Banerjee shot back, saying, “I was a Congress person too. I was a vice-president of the Youth Congress.”
“You had driven Didi (Mamata Banerjee) out of the Congress… Tell about that. In 1997, you threw Didi out of the party. Had you not, the status of the Congress would not have been such,” the TMC leader said.At this, Gandhi intervened and said it was former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi who had given love and respect to ‘Didi’.
“Yes, Rajiv ji had given love and respect to Didi. But later, the Congress joined hands with the CPI-M (which was in power in West Bengal then). But our fight was against the CPI-M,” Kalyan Banerjee said.
At that time, even Congress stalwart Pranab Mukherjee, senior leader Priya Ranjan Dasmunsi and others were in favour of joining hands with the CPI-M while Mamata Banerjee and her followers (within the Congress) were fighting against the Left party, he said.
“When Didi said this, she was driven out of the party (Congress),” the TMC MP said.
At this, Yadav told him that Congress is now fully backing ‘Didi’, which the TMC leader acknowledged.
The Congress, which had been in power at the Centre and most states for a long time since Independence, could win just 99 seats in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.
It currently rules just four out of 28 states, and has been out of power at the Centre since 2014, when the BJP-led NDA ended the UPA’s 10-year rule.
