Bifurcation blues not over, Nitish to dare Didi at home

While the temperamental Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee is yet to get over the Eastern Railways (ER) bifurcation blues, Railways Mi...

While the temperamental Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee is yet to get over the Eastern Railways (ER) bifurcation blues, Railways Minister Nitish Kumar is not only getting on with his business, he is also visiting Kolkata — Didi’s bastion — on December 22.

Nitish today said: ‘‘I am not bothered about who is saying what. I am going there to do work.’’

On his first visit to the state after the ER bifurcation — over which Mamata refused to be re-inducted into the Vajpayee Cabinet — Nitish will be inaugurating a new terminal in Belurmath, near Kolkata.

Clearly an attempt to woo back Bengal, where the Left, the Trinamool and the Congress got together to lambast Nitish for shifting part of the ER (till then headquartered in Kolkata) to Hajipur in Bihar.

Nitish today claimed he had put two of West Bengal’s ongoing railway project on fast track. ‘‘The Balurghat railway line extension project in North Bengal will be complete by March 2000. And the contractual bottlenecks in the Digha-Tamluk railway line project have also been removed,’’ he said.

Underlining the fact that even the ruling Left Front in West Bengal had put the bifurcation business behind them, the minister said: ‘‘The initial invitation came from CPI MP Ajay Chakraborty who wanted me to inaugurate a project in his constituency. There will be other work as well.’’ In Chakraborty’s constituency, while Nitish will flag off the electrification of the Barasat-Bashirhaat line, Trinamool activists will be organising black-flag demonstration against him.

But Nitish seems bent on delivering a snub to Mamata, who’s now become an NDA fence-sitter, in her own territory. Today, he flaunted his interest: ‘‘The Metro project has to be extended till Garia (southern most end of the city). It is the first Metro project, we have an interest in it.’’