‘Jhatka, kalesh’: BJP taunts Rahul Gandhi, Congress after TMC’s Bengal snub

New Delhi: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Sunday taunted the Congress after Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress announced candidates for all 42 West Bengal Lok Sabha seats, saying wherever Rahul Gandhi has gone, the INDIA bloc died.
“Today, yet another ‘Jhatka’ yet another ‘Kalesh’ in INDI alliance. Mamata Banerjee has unilaterally declared the seats and now Congress is looking here and there. Wherever Rahul Gandhi has gone, the INDI alliance took its last breath,” BJP spokesperson Shehzad Poonawalla said, according to ANI.
He was referring to Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra passing through West Bengal last month. 
Poonawalla also accused the Congress of being silent on the allegations raised by women in Sandeshkhali against Trinamool Congress leader Sheikh Shahjahan.
The Sandeshkhali issue has become a major BJP versus Trinamool slugfest ahead of the Lok Sabha election. 
Trinamool’s Sheikh Shahjahan, accused of assaulting women in Sandeshkhali and grabbing their lands, was arrested by the West Bengal police.
“Congress party tried to keep a strategic silence on Sandeshkhali. Priyanka Vadra and Rahul Gandhi said nothing about Sheikh Shahjahan, and Mallikarjun Kharge defended it,” Poonawala claimed.
“Mamata Banerjee had asked the Congress to take two seats or else carry on as Congress won’t get even 40 seats across the country… This is the state of their alliance,” he added.
Congress and TMC leaders have been engaged in a war of words in the recent past over seat-sharing in West Bengal, with the Mamata Banerjee-led party asserting that it cannot offer more than two seats. The Congress has two MPs from West Bengal.
She later announced that her party will contest the elections alone. The Congress, however, has been hopeful of an alliance in the state. 
 
Earlier today, the Congress reacted to the announcement by the Trinamool Congress and said it has always maintained that it wants to have a respectable seat-sharing agreement with the TMC in West Bengal.
“The Indian National Congress has always maintained that such an agreement has to be finalised through negotiations and not by unilateral announcements. The Indian National Congress has always wanted the INDIA group to fight the BJP together,” Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh said.
West Bengal Congress president Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, however, said that by announcing 42 candidates from West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee has proved that no political leader or party should trust her.
The Congress has finalised seat-sharing deals with the Samajwadi Party, with Aam Aadmi Party in Delhi, with DMK and is also close to clinching the deal with the National Conference in Jammu and Kashmor and the MVA in Maharashtra.