Mamata Banerjee met Rahul & Sonia

New Delhi, Aug 02: West Bengal Chief Minister and Trinamool Congress (TMC) chief Mamata Banerjee met Congress president Rahul Gandhi and senior party leader Sonia Gandhi on Wednesday.

She discussed the National Register of Citizens (NRC) of Assam and the possibility of Opposition parties fighting the 2019 Lok Sabha elections together against the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Speaking to reporters after the meeting in New Delhi, Mamata criticised the BJP for the lakhs of names excluded from the Assam NRC. She said: "My concern is that the over 40 lakh people missing from the list belong to other states in the country. What does the BJP want? Peace or civil war? Some people have been living there (in Assam) for generations. How has this happened to our genuine voters?"

The final draft of the NRC was published in Assam with 2.9 crore names on Monday. After the list was released, the BJP had said there should be a similar effort to "identify illegal migrants from Bangladesh in West Bengal".

Mamata claimed that the BJP was "politically nervous" and "tensed" because it knows it won't be coming to power in 2019. She said: "If they only make statements with abuses, we won't respond in their tone. It is in our culture to respond peacefully. Our aim is to oust the BJP. All parties that want this will come together... Rabindranath Tagore wrote a song about everybody being there for everybody. What is wrong with us following that?"

The West Bengal chief minister said the meeting with Rahul and Sonia focussed on ousting the BJP at the Centre, and that no state was discussed in particular. She added that her first priority was to bring all Opposition parties together to take on the BJP in the Lok Sabha elections.