West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee is likely to skip the NITI Aayog meeting slated to be held in New Delhi on May 27, an official said on Wednesday. The reports come a day after her party, the Trinamool Congress (TMC), announced that it would boycott the inauguration of the new Parliament building in New Delhi to be held on May 28. “The Bengal CM may not be participating in the NITI Aayog scheduled in New Delhi on May 27,” a senior bureaucrat said. Earlier in May, Banerjee had announced that she would attend the NITI Aayog meeting and raise issues of the state. “I will be participating at the Niti Ayog meeting on May 27 in New Delhi because it is the only platform to highlight the issues of a state,” the CM had said during a press briefing at Nabanna on May 15. On Tuesday, the CM had met her Delhi and Punjab counterparts Arvind Kejriwal and Bhagwant Mann. Kejriwal and Mann met Banerjee to seek support for the Delhi government's fight against the Centre over an ordinance on the control of administrative services in the national capital. Banerjee had assured the two Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leaders of her party’s support against the Centre. Talking about the TMC’s decision to not attend the Parliament inauguration, the party's Rajya Sabha MP Sukhendu Sekhar Roy said, “The party has decided not to participate in the ceremony because it is not only unparliamentary and unconstitutional but also an indecent decision to have the Prime Minister inaugurate it. The BJP is directly insulting the President who is also a woman from a Scheduled Tribes.”
