The Trinamool Congress has taken a dig at the BJP for bringing the country to a pass where as high a person as its Finance Minister cannot fight elections for want of money.
Days after reports went viral that Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had expressed her unwillingness to contest the election for want of money, senior TMC leader Kunal Ghosh on Friday said that “if a Finance Minister of a country cannot fight elections then how a common man will enter the fray … imagine the situation to which the BJP has brought us to,” reminding how Bengal Chief Minister had earlier demanded State-funded elections.
“This is the reason why our leader Mamata Banerjee had demanded State-funded elections … but this Government is not prepared to take good advises … they want corruption money to enter electoral politics where only the richer party will campaign and win the elections and poorer parties will suffer,” he said.
Reacting on the issue Bengal Congress president Adhir Chowdhury too expressed concern at the role of money and muscle power in the Indian politics.
“I have never said that like many others Nirmala Sitharaman ji is corrupt … I remember how she married off her daughter in a humble programme … this is why I even told her in Parliament that she should have offered us some sweets only … I extended my good wishes for her daughter … I appreciate her situation because in South India you need more money than in other places to fight elections … true this is a situation which has to be seriously thought about,” Chowdhury said.
Earlier replying to a question whether she was going to fight the elections Sitharaman told members of Rajya Sabha that the party had asked her to do so but she had politely turned down the offer as she did not have the kind of money required to contest in a Lok Sabha elections. “The party did ask me but after thinking over it for a week or 10 days, I went back to say, maybe not. My party president asked me ‘would you want to contest from somewhere in the south - option is yours, Tamil Nadu or Andhra Pradesh’, but I don’t have that kind of money to contest. I also have a problem because whether it is Andhra or Tamil Nadu, it is also going to be a question of the various kinds of winnability criteria that they use - are you from this community, are you from this religion? I said I don’t think I will be able to do it. The party was graceful enough… to accept my arguments and say ‘chalo, you won’t’. So, I am not contesting,” she said.
