West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has been meeting all top BJP leaders since yesterday. After her meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, she met Union Home Minister Amit Shah in New Delhi on Thursday.
The two leaders met at Shah’s office at the North Block.
Earlier, in her meeting with the PM, Mamata Banerjee had raised the issue of name change for the state from West Bengal to ‘Bangla’. She also invited the PM to inaugurate the ₹12,000-crore mining project at the Deucha Pachami coal block in Birbhum district. She said the meeting was non-political and fruitful.
Post her meeting with Home Minister Amit Shah, she said, “I handed over a letter to him (HM Amit Shah), told him that of the 19 lakh people left out of NRC, many are Hindi speaking, Bengali speaking and local Assamese. Many genuine voters have been left out. This should be looked into. I submitted an official letter.”
This is the first meeting between the two leaders post BJP came back in power.
She raised the issue of National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam in the meeting and said that no Indian should be put through difficulties and spoke about the status of the 1.9 million people who were excluded from the final NRC.
“My stand and that of Bihar CM Nitish Kumar is same, we don’t need an NRC in our states,” the Trinamool Supremo said.
The BJP and , in particular, Home Minister Amit Shah have, however, on many occasions made it clear that the NRC process will be done across the country to weed out “illegal migrants”.
The meeting between the two lasted about 30 minutes.
She further added that the meeting was a part of her “constitutional duty”.