‘TMC win will help execute Ghatal Master Plan’

Kolkata: Trinamool Congress (TMC) supremo Mamata Banerjee on Friday said that if her party candidates for Midnapore June Malia and Ghatal Deepak Adhikari (Dev) win from these two Lok Sabha constituencies, the people in the region will no longer require depending upon the Centre to implement Ghatal Master plan.

Banerjee was addressing an election rally in support of Dev in West Midnapore’s Pingla.

From the rally she urged the people to vote for Dev and Malia so that they win the poll. “If they win, it will be easier to implement the Ghatal Master plan,” she said.

“I will give the people of Midnapore the Ghatal master plan as a gift. We would no longer need to depend upon the Centre to implement it. Dev is one of my favourite candidates. I am watching that Dev has become a good politician,” Banerjee said, heaping praise on Dev.

Dev is seeking re-election from the Ghatal seat for a third consecutive term. This time, he is up against BJP’s Hiran Chatterjee, another film star who became an MLA in 2021 by winning the Kharagpur Sadar seat.

The CPI fielded Tapan Ganguly in Ghatal. Later in the day, Banerjee addressed a rally in Garbeta for the party’s Jhargram candidate Kalipada Soren.

She said leaders of the BJP never came to the region when blood-shed was a daily affair because of Maoist activities. “It was me as the Opposition leader who would come to stand with the people during those times. Now, they are talking big,” she said.

Banerjee said she always believed in the slogan of ‘badla noy, badal chai’ (want change, not revenge) that she gave during the 2011 Assembly elections in which her TMC ousted the CPI(M)-led Left Front. In the 2019 LS elections, Dev defeated BJP’s Bharati Ghosh by a margin of more than 1 lakh votes. Dev had secured 7,17,959 votes while Ghosh managed to get 6,09,986 votes. CPI candidate Tapan Gangopadhyay received only 97,060 votes.