West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Sunday said Narendra Modi "should resign first," since he became the Prime Minister with the votes of the people whose names were allegedly being “deleted arbitrarily” during the SIR by the Election Commission. Banerjee said Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar should ask the prime minister to resign. "If Modi has become the Prime Minister on this voter list in 2024, why will those in it not be allowed to exercise their franchise now?" Banerjee said at the central Kolkata’s sit-in platform against the SIR exercise being conducted in the poll-bound West Bengal. Asking why Governor C V Ananda Bose had to resign abruptly on March 5, Banerjee said, "Let there be an inquiry; he still had three years of his term left. He was supposed to receive the President on that day at Bagdogra. Was he suddenly called to Delhi and asked to resign?" The CM wondered whether the Modi government was trying to install a "yes man" in the post.
The TMC supremo also asked why Vice President Jagdeep Dhankhar, who had earlier been the governor of West Bengal, resigned from his post in July last year. "Should there be an inquiry into this matter?" she said. Maintaining that the CBI and ED would be under pressure, she said, "You entrust our CID to conduct the inquiry, they will do it." Dhankar was a governor of West Bengal earlier and had frequent run-ins with the Mamata Banerjee government during his tenure in the state. Banerjee accused the BJP of having planned the imbroglio over President Droupadi Murmu's visit to Bagdogra on Saturday by using a private organisation. "Yesterday's game was preplanned. I do not blame the Hon'ble President," the chief minister said.
Banerjee claimed that her government had suggested that this organisation would not be able to hold the programme of such magnitude where the President was to be present. Claiming that the issue of logical discrepancy has come up only in West Bengal's Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, she said, "This is a planted game." Accusing the BJP of being anti-women, Banerjee said that on International Women's Day, she wants to say that the voting rights of many women have been struck off in the ongoing SIR. "We have only one demand, genuine voters must be allowed to exercise their voting right," she said. Banerjee said that it is because the TMC is in power in the state that everyone is living happily. "But if it so happens that we are not in power some day, one should know that when a community unites, they can destroy anything in a second," she said, without elaborating.
She asked people not to listen to the BJP's propaganda. "I have heard that the BJP is making propaganda that I have helped infiltration of Muslims into Bengal," she said, maintaining that these people have been in the state since Independence. Banerjee said that she was not even born then, so she couldn't engineer their infiltration. Accusing the saffron party's predecessors of having been the "stooge" of the British, she asked, "Who killed Gandhiji?" Criticising the Centre for the price hike of cooking gas, the chief minister said that the people will have to bear the burden of any hike in fuel prices owing to the ongoing war in West Asia.