Express News Service
KOLKATA: West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee’s party Trinamool Congress will not join the fray in Uttar Pradesh in the upcoming Assembly elections, said Samajwadi Party (SP)’s national vice president Kiranmay Nanda on Tuesday.
Nanda, after holding a meeting with Mamata Banerjee at her Kalighat residence in Kolkata, made it clear that the Bengal CM would visit Lucknow on February 8 and hold a meeting with SP chief Akhilesh Yadav before addressing a rally virtually to announce her support.
“The TMC is not keen on participating in Uttar Pradesh elections. All seats will be given to Akhilesh Yadav. It was Mamata Banerjee’s party that shattered BJP’s dream of wresting power in Bengal in the 2021 Assembly elections in West Bengal. It is a lesson for the entire opposition and her fight was unprecedented. The entire nation saw the fight she had put up against the BJP juggernaut. Mamata will address a public rally virtually in Lucknow announcing the TMC’s support to our party,” said Nanda.
Nanda also said Mamata would also visit Modi’s Lok Sabha constituency in February but the day is yet to be fixed.
Ahead of the Bengal Assembly polls, Yadav had announced that the SP would support the TMC without fielding any candidate. Yadav had sent SP’s Rajya Sabha MP Jaya Bachchan as the party’s representative to Bengal to campaign for the ruling TMC. Though the TMC is not participating in the electoral battle in UP, Mamata has been aggressively campaigning in the other poll-bound state Goa.
Before the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, Yadav had attended the grand opposition meeting hosted by the Trinamool Congress chief in January three years ago.
Nanda was one of the longest-serving fisheries ministers of West Bengal during the erstwhile Left Front regime as an elected representative of the Socialist Party. He had merged his party with the SP in 2010.
