No chance of meeting PM separately this time: Mamata

KOLKATA: West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has said that she was not meeting the Prime Minister separately during her Delhi visit.

"There is no chance of separately meeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi during my four- day visit to New Delhi and Rajasthan, starting from Monday," the Chief Minister informed the reporters at Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose International Airport in Kolkata before leaving for the national capital on Monday afternoon.

She said that she will be attending the chief ministers meeting at the Rashtrapati Bhavan late Monday evening which has been convened by the Prime Minister to discuss India's hosting of the G20 summit next year.

"There I will have some interaction with the Prime Minister. But there is no chance of meeting The Prime Minister separately this time," the chief minister said. She also did not give the details of whether there was any possibility of her meeting with the leaders of other parties during her visit.

Mamata Banerjee has already made it clear that she will be attending the meeting at the Rashtrapati Bhavan not as the chief minister of West Bengal but as the national president of All India Trinamool Congress.

On Tuesday, she is supposed to leave for Rajasthan to visit two iconic religious sites in the desert, Ajmer Sharif and Pushkar Lake. "When I was the railways minister, I arranged the railways link to these two religious sites. I had a wish for a long time to visit these two places, which I will be fulfilling this time," the chief minister said before leaving for New Delhi.

On Wednesday after returning to New Delhi, Mamata Banerjee is expected to meet all her party -- Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha members -- at the official residence of the veteran party MP Saugata Roy in New Delhi.

In the meeting, she is expected to finalise the party's strategy within Parliament during the forthcoming winter session of the House.

All the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha members of the party have been asked to be mandatorily present at the meeting. Party sources said in the meeting that the chief minister also was expected to outline on how to counter issues raised by other party MPs on the various controversies in the state.