West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee
There will be no place for West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool Congress in Telangana, senior Congress leader Marri Shashidhar Reddy claimed on Thursday.
Responding to media reports that Trinamool Congress is testing waters in the south and that some leaders in Telangana, besides Karnataka, were approached, Shashidhar Reddy said TMC would be a non-starter in the state.
"She (Mamata Banerjee) succeeded in leading the TMC to stave off the strong challenge from BJP in the recent West Bengal elections. However, they have set their eyes on expanding to other states, particularly by claiming to replace the Congress to counter the BJP," he said in a statement.
"Any attempt by her to lay claim to the legacy of Gandhiji, Nehruvian Secularism and true Congress ideology will be totally untenable on several grounds," said Shashidhar Reddy, son of former Chief Minister Marri Chenna Reddy.
People will be reminded that she has been a part of the NDA in the past and that she was a member of late PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s cabinet, he said.
People would increasingly realise that Rahul Gandhi is the only leader who has been consistently taking on the BJP and it is the Congress alone that has a pan-India presence, Shashidhar Reddy, a former Vice Chairman of National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), added.
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