West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Saturday hit out at Union Minister for Rural Development Jairam Ramesh for using what she termed “vindictive, unethical and unconstitutional” language in an official letter addressed to the her.
The letter was written by the Union minister informing Banerjee about the release of the fourth instalment of a fund amounting to Rs 601 crore to West Bengal for implementation of MGNREGA in 2012-13. However, towards the end of the letter, Ramesh took a dig at the Trinamool supremo for her “brain-dead” comment on the UPA government at the Centre.
“Incidentally, may I add that this reflects how sensitive the so-called “brain-dead government in Delhi” is to the needs of the people of West Bengal,” the letter, dated October 19, says towards the end.
Ramesh’s comment was in reference to Banerjee’s observation that the Congress-led UPA government would not last more than six months . In an interview to a Bengali daily, Banerjee had recently said, “ The UPA government is a brain-dead government now. A brain-dead patient can be kept on ventilator. Everyone knows the patient has died but no one wants to pull the plug.”
An angry Mamata Banerjee went ahead to upload the letter on Facebook to reveal the “attitude of the central government towards the state of West Bengal.”
“The statement is clearly vindictive, unethical and unconstitutional. I am really stunned to see that a Union Minister can write a distasteful statement like this to a state government. This creates a bad precedence and adds stigma to healthy democratic fibre of our country,” Banerjee said on the popular social networking site.