New Delhi: The Trinamool Congress has mocked suspended leader Mukul Roy for making "desperate attempts to please the BJP" and defended its past association with BJP by saying that it was different under the leadership of former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
No one should confuse a statesman like Atal Bihari Vajpayee with Prime Minister Narendra Modi or BJP president Amit Shah, TMC secretary general Partha Chatterjee said.
"Yes we were part of the BJP-led NDA from 1998. But that was a different time. The NDA was then led by a statesman like Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who rose above party politics to lead the nation by taking along all castes, creeds and religions.
He was a secular person. I want to ask can anybody put Atal Bihari Vajpayee and present prime minister Narendra Modi in the same bracket," Chatterjee said.
"We had joined hands (with BJP) because of the secular leadership of Vajpayee. The day we understood that Vajpayee is no longer leading BJP and NDA, we parted ways. Then also we had fought against communalism and now too we are fighting against it," he said.
Roy had termed the BJP as a secular party and said the TMC would not have tasted success without its backing at the national level during the initial years.
Terming Roy as a "traitor trying to weaken the party", Chatterjee questioned, "Why is he making such statements now? Why he didn't say such things when he was in the party, when he was made the railways minister? Actually he is making desperate attempts to please the BJP and get into its good books. We called him a traitor and he himself proved it."
Chatterjee challenged Roy to contest elections from any assembly seat in the state.
"Instead of making such comments like a traitor, why doesn't he contest election from any of the 294 assembly seats in Bengal? We will see if he is able to win it. He is no one without the support of Mamata Banerjee," Chatterjee said.
Once the second-in-command in the TMC after Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, Roy has been suspended for six years for "anti-party activities" after he said on September 25 that he would resign from the party after Durga Puja.