West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee did a u-turn on her decision to attend Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s swearing-in ceremony scheduled to be held on Thursday.
In a statement, Banerjee said while she was thankful for the ‘Constitutional invitation’ and that she had wanted to attend but on account of BJP claiming that 54 people had been killed in Bengal in political violence, which she said was untrue, she would not be attending.
Claiming that these killing were because of personal enmities, she asked to be excused from the ceremony.
This was after Banerjee told reporters at the state secretariat in Kolkata on Tuesday that the invitation for the ceremony arrived on Tuesday and she would be attending it as “constitutional courtesy”.
“I have spoken to a couple of other chief ministers and have decided to attend it.
“There are certain ceremonial programmes under the Constitution. We try to attend such events when we get an invitation for the swearing-in programmes of the president and the prime minister,” she said.
Modi and Banerjee were engaged in a blame game over the violence in Bengal that has left many people injured and two dead in recent incidents.
While the BJP has blamed the Mamata government for the violence, TMC has lashed out at the BJP.
Modi, who spearheaded the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) poll campaign in West Bengal, addressed several rallies taking a swipe at Banerjee by calling her “speedbreaker Didi”.
He also accused her of running a syndicate that indulged in extortion.