BJP weaponising pain and spreading hate: TMC

Kolkata: Trinamool Congress on Tuesday reacted sharply to BJP's attack on the Bengal govt over the deaths and widespread inundation following the overnight downpour."Yesterday, Kolkata faced the fury of a rare cloudburst. Nearly 300 mm of rain fell within hours, a scale that overwhelms any city, no matter its infrastructure. Scientists have said the same in Mumbai 2005, Chennai 2015, Delhi 2023, no city escapes when the skies open without pause," Bengal's finance minister Chandrima Bhattacharya wrote on X."Yet what does BJP do? They ignore science, they ignore compassion, they ignore climate realities. Their only obsession is to weaponise pain and spread hate. They think people cannot tell the difference between a natural calamity and their propaganda," she said.Earlier in the day, BJP IT cell chief and party's Bengal minder Amit Malviya had accused the Mamata Banerjee govt of "criminal negligence" over the natural calamity in Kolkata."The Alipore MET department issued a warning a month ago about incessant rainfall during Puja. One month! Their response? Absolute, deafening silence. No plans. No preparation. They just sat back and let the waters rise. This isn't just a governance failure; it's a deliberate betrayal of every single person in this city," Malviya had said in a post on X.To this, Bengal opposition leader Suvendu Adhikari added, "A procession of deaths in an inundated city!""At an age when advanced technology provides accurate predictions of rainfall locations and its volume, citizens pay the price of incompetent and indifferent municipal bodies of Kolkata and Bidhannagar. They have not learnt lessons from the past, and the same picture gets repeated year after year," he wrote on X.Women and child development minister Sashi Panja said officials of the KMC and the state govt were working relentlessly on the streets to ease people's distress."Amid calamity, leadership is measured in compassion and action. BJP offers neither. Instead, they mock Bengal while their own govts fail their people year after year at the first sign of heavy rain. ‘Empathy? That's beyond their vocabulary," she wrote on X.Panja accused the BJP of selectively targeting govts run by opposition parties. "When Gurgaon gets flooded, the BJP stays mum. And at a time of calamity, instead of showing compassion for people, all BJP does is mock the Bengal govt," she said.