Mamata Banerjee defends an indefensible use of her central ministry to campaign in her state
She now spells her name Mamataa. We suspect the influence of Bollywood numerologists. She says, nothing doing. She has always spelt her name with a double A. It was the officials who had been getting it wrong all this time. Her party?s new slogan has turned up in Eastern Railways? advertisements published in newspapers across Kolkata. Her minister calls it a mere coincidence. Agriculture is our inspiration, industry is our perception?this is what railways communications officials coincidentally have on their mind these days. Astonishing. CPM is up in arms, calling this a blatantly brazen deployment of the Railways as a Trinamool campaign tool ahead of the Assembly elections in West Bengal. There is merit in the charge.
Even when she was presenting the Union Railways Budget back in February last year, the minister was suspected of carrying on a proxy election campaign in her home state. And earlier just this week, we have had occasion to comment on how her continued focus on West Bengal may be at the expense of her Cabinet charge, what with the railways teetering on the verge of bankruptcy and looking like it?s going to default on paying its annual dividend to the government. Not only is this a big and bad turnaround since the days of Lalu Prasad, the odds are short that the current minister would have been kind if the lantern had turned up in railway advertisements before she took charge. She would have wasted no time before rubbishing claims of coincidence.