Kolkata: West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Monday urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to nudge the United Nations to deploy a peacekeeping force in Bangladesh, even as the Bharatiya Janata Party, the main challenger to her Trinamool Congress in the state, moved to cash in on the atrocities on the minority community in the neighbouring country.
Banerjee sought Modi’s interventions to bring back the citizens of India from Bangladesh. She criticised the BJP-led government in the Centre for keeping mum on the issue for the past 10 days. She demanded that either the prime minister or External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar should brief parliament about India’s position on the current situation in Bangladesh.
The chief minister’s statement in the legislative assembly of West Bengal came on a day the Leader of the Opposition, Suvendu Adhikari, and other BJP leaders joined the protests by an organisation of monks near the Petrapole-Benapole land customs station on the border between India and Bangladesh against the atrocities on the Hindus in the neighbouring country.
Adhikari vowed to impose a blockade and stop the export of all essential commodities from India to Bangladesh if the interim government, led by economist Muhammad Yunus, in the neighbouring country could not stop the persecution of the Hindus. He also demanded the immediate release of Hindu monk Chinmoy Krishna Das Brahmachari, who had been arrested by Bangladesh Police a week back and charged with sedition allegedly for disrespecting the national flag of the neighbouring country.
Banerjee said in the state assembly that it was beyond her purview to comment on India’s bilateral relations with Bangladesh.
“However, in the wake of the recent developments and the experience narrated by many people here having relatives in Bangladesh, the arrests of people, who wanted to come over to our side (India from Bangladesh), and my conversations with the ISKCON representatives here, I have to make this statement on the floor of this House,” she said, adding: “If required, let an international peacekeeping force be sent to Bangladesh after talking to the (interim) government there to help them restore normalcy.”