‘Defeated by conspiracy’: West Bengal chief minister refuses to resign after election loss | India
There is a political showdown in India’s West Bengal state as Prime Minister Mamata Banerjee, India’s most powerful female politician, refuses to resign after losing elections to her prime minister’s party this week.
Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) on Monday won a landslide victory in the state elections in West Bengal, where Banerjee and the Trinamool Congress party (TMC) have been in power for 15 years.
But in a press conference on Tuesday night, Banerjee accused the BJP of “forcefully taking over” the elections and made it clear that she had no intention of resigning, paving the way for a constitutional crisis in the state.
“Why should I resign? We did not lose,” he said. “Authority has been plundered. Where does the issue of resignation arise?” He said the TMC was “defeated not by public instruction but by conspiracy”.
According to the Indian constitution, 71-year-old Banerjee cannot legally remain as prime minister, given the TMC’s loss in the election. The West Bengal governor said in a statement that if Banerjee did not step aside voluntarily, he would send police to remove her from her office. The case may go to the high court.
The BJP moved to ban advisors appointed by Banerjee from entering its offices. Sambit Patra, the party’s national spokesperson, called Banerjee’s refusal to resign “blasphemy of the constitution”.
Patra said: “What Mamata Banerjee said and did today is extremely unfortunate. It is an attack on the long-standing democratic convention. This is an attack on democracy and the constitution, not the BJP.”
Banerjee, who is referred to as the goddess of fire by supporters, and didiMeaning elder sister, she built a reputation for decades as a tough, street-fighting politician by leading the TMC to defeat the Communist party that had ruled West Bengal through terror for more than 30 years.
Victory in West Bengal, one of the largest and most politically important states, was a long-standing goal for the BJP and was seen as one of the last obstacles to its complete dominance of India’s political landscape.
While the BJP won a historic 207 out of 294 seats, the TMC fell to 80. Banerjee alleged that Modi and home minister Amit Shah “directly interfered” in the West Bengal elections and that the election commission chairman appointed by the Modi government was the “villain of this election”.
With the BJP now controlling 21 of the 28 states, Banerjee warned against the BJP’s assertion of “one-party rule” over the country and said she would consult other opposition leaders.
One of the opposition leaders who supported Banerjee’s decision to reject the resignation was Shiv Sena’s (UBT) parliament speaker Sanjay Raut. Raut said the election commission has become a “slave” of the Modi government and opposition parties should unite against the “dictatorship of the center and the partisan behavior of the election commission”.
