Mamata Banerjee, after her sweeping victory in the West Bengal Assembly Election, has emerged as a key opposition leader in national politics.
West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee today met Prime Minister Narendra Modi at his residence in the national capital. This was the first meeting between the two leaders after a heated assembly election in the state that saw both of them taking swipes at each other frequently.
Mamata Banerjee, after meeting the PM, told reporters that there should be a Supreme Court-monitored inquiry into the Pegasus scandal that had revealed that opposition leaders, two union ministers and 40 journalists were possibly spied on by an Indian client of Israel company that sells the spyware only to governments.
Ms Banerjee’s nephew and TMC leader Abhishek Banerjee is in the list of names that have surfaced in the Pegasus story, along with her Election strategist Prashant Kishor.
Calling her meeting with PM a ‘courtesy visit’, Ms Banerjee said she discussed with the PM the Covid situation, the supply of vaccines and medicine to the state and also a proposal to rename Bengal as Bangla. “I should not speak what the PM said,” she told reporters when pressed for details.
The Bengal CM said that she’s also supposed to meet President Ramnath Kovind. “But the problem is they are asking me to have an RT-PCR done before meeting him. I have got both the doses though. Where will I go here,” she said.
With her three-day visit to New Delhi being packed with politically significant meetings, Ms Banerjee has been invited tomorrow by Congress President Sonia Gandhi.
Ms Banerjee will also meet Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Thursday.
Earlier today, Ms Banerjee met with Congress leaders Kamal Nath and Anand Sharma.
Samajwadi Party leader Akhilesh Yadav is also expected to meet the Bengal chief minister. “I will also have a meeting with Javed Akhtar and Shabana Azmi,” she told reporters.
Mamata Banerjee, after her sweeping victory in the West Bengal Assembly Election, has emerged as a key opposition leader in national politics, who can fight the PM Modi-led BJP. Her visit to the national capital, and her being appointed as leader of the Trinamool parliamentary party despite not being an MP, show her readiness to play a larger role in national politics beyond Bengal.
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