Kolkata, July 6:
Launching a blistering counterattack against the rebel faction that has torn the Trinamool Congress apart, party supremo Mamata Banerjee on Saturday accused the dissidents of conspiring with the BJP to engineer a split and dared them to formally join the saffron party if they had the courage.
In an emotionally charged Facebook Live address, her first since the party plunged into its worst organisational crisis, Banerjee defended her leadership, lashed out at the rebels, vowed to press ahead with the TMC’s July 21 Martyrs’ Day rally despite administrative hurdles, and declared that while individuals may desert the party, “an institution does not cease to exist”.
Responding to the allegations, the BJP claimed that leaders were quitting TMC because the cut money, which “acted as its binding glue”, has been stopped after the saffron party came to power.“I dare the treacherous and ungrateful traitors who are abandoning the party to directly join the BJP and take me on if they have the courage to do so, instead of playing this dishonest BJP-sponsored game,” Banerjee said on a day she lost another long-time associate