This Is Prime Minister Modi’s Chance To Call Mamata Banerjee’s Bluff On Central Funds Freeze To Bengal

Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has sought an appointment with Prime Minister Narendra Modi “any day between December 18 and 20” to discuss the alleged freeze on funds for various welfare projects and development schemes for Bengal.

Banerjee, and her lieutenants, have been alleging over the past two years that the Union Government has denied Bengal its due share of funds. The Trinamool Congress supremo and other leaders have made this a major political issue in the state. 

On Sunday (December 10), Banerjee repeated the allegation while addressing a public rally in North Bengal’s Alipurduar. She said that the Union Government had held back Rs 1.1 lakh crore which was Bengal’s rightful due. 

“Imagine all the development we could have undertaken with the funds which have been held back. The Union Government collects huge amounts of funds as GST from Bengal, but gives back nothing,” she alleged. 

The Union Government, she added, has not disbursed funds for wages under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) for the past few years. Funds for constructing houses under the PM Awas Yojana have been stopped, as also funds for many other Centrally sponsored schemes like the PM POSHAN (the mid-day meal scheme) and the PMGSY (rural roads scheme). 

The Trinamool Congress has held demonstrations, organised rallies and its MPs have staged sit-ins at the foot of Gandhi’s statue in Parliament to draw attention to what the party alleges is the Centre’s “deprivation of Bengal”. 

Trinamool Congress MPs have raised this issue, terming it as an "economic blockade of Bengal”, a few times in Parliament. 

Trinamool protests

In early October, Trinamool chief Mamata Banerjee’s nephew and heir apparent Abhishek Banerjee led a delegation of party MPs and supporters to Krishi Bhavan (which houses the office of the Rural Development Ministry) to meet junior minister Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti. 

The minister was willing to meet Banerjee and the party MPs, but the Trinamool leaders insisted on taking along all party supporters who had accompanied them for the meeting with the Union Minister. 

Naturally, the Minister refused since such a meeting was likely to descend into a chaos with the Trinamool supporters intent on shouting slogans inside the Minister’s office. Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti said she would meet only Abhishek Banerjee and the MPs, and waited in her office for 2.5 hours before leaving. 

The large Trinamool delegation then sat on a dharna inside Krishi Bhavan and had to be forcibly removed by the police later that evening, 

The Trinamool is insistent on staging more such protests to gain public attention and sympathy for its charge that Bengal was being deprived of funds for welfare and development projects. 

The charge is true, but it is only the half-truth.

Banerjee and her party colleagues have been telling the people of Bengal that the reason for the funds freeze lies in the inability of the BJP to unseat the Trinamool Congress from power in 2021. 

“The BJP had dreamt of coming to power in Bengal. But the people of Bengal rejected the BJP (in the 2021 Assembly polls). Angry over this rejection, the vengeful Modi government has stopped all funds to Bengal,” Mamata Banerjee said at the meeting in North Bengal. 

What Mamata Banerjee did not reveal

What Mamata Banerjee will not tell the people of Bengal is that funds for various Centrally-sponsored schemes and projects have been stopped because of large-scale anomalies detected in their implementation.

It is well-known that lakhs of fake ration cards were created in Bengal to syphon off rations meant for the poor. Hundreds of crores of Rupees meant for payment of wages to the poor under MGNREGA were allegedly pocketed by Trinamool leaders and functionaries of rural bodies and government officials.

Under the PM Awas Yojana (housing for poor), funds were alleged to have been allocated to lakhs of undeserving Trinamool functionaries and their relatives, and money pocketed by many Trinamool functionaries and officials by creating fake identities of beneficiaries.

Such largescale anomalies were detected in many other Centrally-sponsored schemes. After they were detected and brought to the Bengal government’s notice, the Union Government asked Bengal to take corrective action. 

The ‘corrective action’ included lodging police complaints against those who had benefited illegally from the schemes or had syphoned off funds meant for the poor, arresting them and prosecuting them. 

But the Bengal government has consistently refused to take such action. Understandably so, because such action would have put Trinamool functionaries and junior government officials behind bars. 

“Mamata Banerjee does not have the guts to take action against those who misused and pocketed Central funds. The Trinamool Congress will collapse if she does that. Most of her leaders and party workers at the village, block and district levels will end up behind bars. She just cannot afford to do that,” said BJP leader Suvendu Adhikari. 

The Union Government has made it clear that till action is taken against those who had syphoned off funds allocated for the Centrally-sponsored projects, no more allocations will be possible. Merely recovering the money that had been pocketed also won’t do; the guilty have to be prosecuted. 

Central funds under some Centrally-sponsored schemes for the poor in the health, family welfare and housing sectors have also been held up because Mamata Banerjee had rebranded those schemes to make them appear as if those are the state government’s own schemes. 

The Union Government has a strict code for branding the infrastructure and paraphernalia for these schemes, and all states adhere to the code. 

“It is only the Bengal government which indulges in all sorts of subterfuge to make Centrally-sponsored schemes appear like state schemes with Mamata Banerjee’s photographs and her pet blue-and-white colour scheme adorning infrastructure, kits etc of such schemes,” said Adhikari. 

But all this is not public knowledge in Bengal.

As the Lok Sabha elections draw near, Mamata Banerjee and her party will step up this rhetoric and make it a key poll issue. 

It is imperative on the part of the BJP to demolish this narrative by laying out the facts before the people of the state. 

Excellent opportunity to call Mamata’s bluff

And the appointment that Banerjee has requested with the Prime Minister is an excellent opportunity for the Union Government to call the Bengal Chief Minister’s bluff. 

If the PM grants the appointment, it will not be the first time that Banerjee will meet Modi on this issue.

Banerjee had met the Prime Minister at the PMO in August last year to request for release of “central funds for MGNREGA, PMGSY and PMAY schemes amounting to Rs 17,996 crore” from the Union Government. 

At that one-on-one meeting, Prime Minister Modi is said to have reiterated the Union Government’s position that the huge amount of funds disbursed earlier which have been misappropriated ought to be recovered and the guilty have to be prosecuted. 

Banerjee is learnt to have told the Prime Minister that she has initiated investigations and requested him to start releasing the funds meant for the Centrally-sponsored schemes without waiting for the outcome of the investigations “in the interests of the people of Bengal”. 

Banerjee’s argument is that the people of Bengal should not be made to suffer because of the wrongdoings of a few. But it is not just a ‘few’ who are guilty of malfeasance, the number of such guilty runs into tens of thousands with allegedly many being Trinamool functionaries.

But Prime Minister Modi is learnt to have underscored the need to start taking action against the erring officials and (Trinamool) politicians in Bengal.

According to people in the know, Mamata Banerjee sat through the meeting tongue-tied as Prime Minister Modi reeled off figures--the huge amounts allocated to Bengal for various schemes and projects--and the extent of anomalies that had been detected. 

She reportedly only nodded and made a meek interjection just once: she acknowledged that funds had been misused and said the guilty would be brought to book, but the Union Government should not hold back disbursal of funds in the meanwhile. 

If the Prime Minister meets the Bengal CM this time, the meeting is most likely to go along the same lines as the one in August last year. 

But this time, the PMO should issue a detailed communique after the meeting on why the Union Government is holding back funds under various welfare and development schemes to Bengal. 

And the BJP should immediately make use of the communique to unveil the truth about largescale corruption in the ranks of the Trinamool Congress. 

A strong counter-narrative about the Trinamool Congress being riven by corruption needs to be launched by the BJP if it wants to get a good number of Lok Sabha seats from Bengal next year. 

Post-script: Mamata Banerjee may not be serious about meeting Prime Minister Modi: she has revealed that she wants a dozen-odd MPs of her party to accompany her to the meeting with the PM. 

She knows fully well that the PMO may turn down her request for meeting the PM with such a large delegation accompanying her. That will allow her to score political brownie points--she will create a narrative that Prime Minister Modi is scared of meeting her. 

The PMO should guard against this and should, at best, ask her to reduce the size of her delegation, and also tell her that other Union Ministers will also be in attendance. 

The reason she wants her MPs to accompany her is because her plan is to have her vociferous MPs forcefully put forth the contention that disbursal of funds should not be held up. 

The bottom line is that Mamata Banerjee cannot afford to take action against all those alleged to have syphoned off Central funds or recover the looted money from them because that would amount to taking action on her own party functionaries. 

The BJP should proactively address this matter and encourage her to take action against any party members and government officials involved in financial misconduct.