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Bengal BJP scoffs at Mamata's
pro-minority utterances

Union Minister of State for Telecommunications and former chief of the Bhartiya Janata Party's West Bengal unit Tapan Sikdar has rejected Union Railway Minister Mamata Banerjee's announcement for jobs reservation for Muslims in the Calcutta Municipal Corporation.

Talking to rediff.com, Sikdar said that it was impossible to make jobs reservation on the basis of religion.

"I do not know under what context Mamata made these remarks. All I can say is that reservations for a particular community is impossible," Sikdar remarked.

Commenting on Mamata's threats to pull out of the National Democratic Alliance should Muslims' interests be suppressed by the central government, Sikdar said that minorities were relatively more secure under the BJP rule.

Mamata, while addressing a Quami Tanzeem meeting in Calcutta on Tuesday, had also said that the Trinamul's participation in the National Democratic Alliance government was primarily due to the presence of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee whom the Trinamul supremo viewed as a secular leader.

This statement has also come under sharp attack from the BJP's Bengal unit chief Asim Ghosh who feels Mamata's sudden change in attitude 'smacked of her desperation to garner the 26 per cent minority votes'.

"Unlike others, ours is not a party run by one leader. Mamata's observation that only Vajpayee was a secular is not true at all. As for her promises to reserve 50 per cent seats for Muslims besides making Urdu the second language of West Bengal, I must say that the BJP will never support such policies, which are formulated along religious lines. We don't view people as Hindus or Muslims. To us, everybody is Indian," Ghosh said.

Meanwhile, Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya refused to comment on the Trinamul chief's promises saying he 'doesn't lend much credence to what Mamata says'.

The BJP and the Trinamul are electoral allies in West Bengal and fought the last two Lok Sabha polls on a common platform. However, the alliance is expected to take a beating before the state goes in for crucial assembly elections early next year.

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