Taking a dig at Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee who is in Delhi to meet the prime minister, BJP national general secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya said on Tuesday that she had sought the appointment with Narendra Modi as a "last-ditch bid" to save the city's former police chief Rajeev Kumar.
Senior BJP leader Mukul Roy, her former right hand man, claimed that Banerjee seeking appointment with Modi is a victory for BJP.
State secretariat sources said the West Bengal chief minister, who is among the strident critics of the BJP and Modi, will meet the prime minister on Wednesday.
Vijayvargiya claimed that Banerjee was aware that Kumar's arrest would ensure that "half of her state cabinet end up in jail" in connection with the multi-crore Saradha deposit default scam.
"Earlier on each and every issue she used to abuse Prime Minister Narendra Modi. She had said that she does not feel the need to respect Modiji as the prime minister. She didn't attend the swearing-in ceremony, NITI Aayog meeting and the meeting of the chief ministers.
"Why is she seeking a meeting with PM Modi all of a sudden is anybody's guess," the West Bengal minder told reporters here.
"Banerjee is making a desperate attempt to save Rajeev Kumar as she is well aware that his arrest would ensure that half of her cabinet will end up in jail. But her attempts to save Rajeev Kumar and party leaders will yield any result," he asserted.
The last time Modi and Banerjee had met was at the convocation ceremony at Visva Bharati University in Shantiniketan on May 25, 2018.
"It is a victory of BJP that Mamata Banerjee is now seeking appointment with the PM. She has earlier said she doesn't accept Modiji as her prime minister. Now she has accepted him as her PM too," Roy said.
Terming BJP's claims as baseless, the TMC said Banerjee was well within her rights to meet the prime minister to discuss developmental issues of the state.
"The Bengal BJP leaders should stop making baseless claims. In a federal structure, a chief minister of a state has every right to meet the prime minister. If Mamata Banerjee goes to meet PM, BJP is making it a controversy. If she does not then too they create a controversy," senior TMC leader and minister Subarta Mukherjee said.
Several TMC leaders and former Kolkata police commissioner Rajeev Kumar have come under the CBI scanner in connection with the Saradha ponzi scam.
The Saradha group of companies had allegedly duped lakhs of people of Rs 2500 crore, promising higher rates of return on their investments.
Kumar, who is currently the West Bengal CID additional director general, was part of a special investigation team set up by the state government to investigate the scam, before the Supreme Court handed over the case to the CBI in 2014, along with other chit fund cases.
He did not appear before the CBI for questioning in the Saradha chitfund case and did not get relief from Barasat district and sessions court on Tuesday on his anticipatory bail application hours after a special court refused to hear the plea.
The CPI(M) and the Congress leadership said the proposed meeting between Modi and Banerjee is a part of "political match fixing" that the TMC and BJP are indulging in in Bengal.
"We have been saying for a long time that TMC and BJP are playing out a fixed match in Bengal. Banerjee is going to meet the prime minister to ensure that CBI goes slow in the chit fund scam investigation. It is just a fixed political match both the parties are playing to fool the masses," senior CPI(M) leader Sujan Chakraborty has said.
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