Kolkata: Trinamool Congress (TMC) chairperson Mamata Banerjee, on Monday, said she would skip the meeting of ‘One Nation One Election’ committee in New Delhi on Tuesday due to her preoccupation with the upcoming state budget which is slated to be placed in the Bengal Legislative Assembly on Thursday.
Banerjee, in a press conference at Nabanna, told reporters that she has communicated her inability to attend the meeting to the committee chief who is former President Ramnath Kovind.
‘I have cancelled my New Delhi trip. The state Budget will be presented in the Assembly on February 8 and there are only two days to go. I am very busy with the state Budget so I have called off my visit.” Banerjee said. The TMC supremo was scheduled to leave for Delhi on Monday late afternoon and return after attending the meeting on Tuesday evening to Kolkata.
Banerjee claimed she spoke to Ramnath Kovind and communicated to him her inability to attend the meeting. “He understood my problem and allowed me the privilege to be absent from the meeting on Tuesday,” she added. Further, she said Kovind permitted her party MPs Sudip Banerjee and Kalyan Banerjee to attend the meeting on her behalf in the national capital.
The committee is mandated to examine and make recommendations for holding simultaneous elections to the Lok Sabha, state assemblies, municipalities and panchayats, keeping in view the existing constitutional framework.
Banerjee, on January 11, had written a letter to the high-level committee expressing disagreement with the concept of holding simultaneous elections for the Lok Sabha and state assemblies, stating that the step will undermine the basic structure of India’s constitutional arrangements.
She had written: “With profound considerations, the Constituent Assembly of India has presented us with a Parliamentary / Cabinet system of government, keeping in view the diversities and pluralities of our great country. But now your design seems to be to tilt the system in favour of Presidentialisation. The design is kept covert, seemingly because autocracy wants a democratic garb now to enter the national public arena. I am against autocracy and hence, I am against your design”.