Mamata Banerjee on 3-day visit to Mumbai from today; to meet Uddhav Thackeray, Sharad Pawar, industrialists

West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee will be in Mumbai on Tuesday and is slated to visit Maharashtra chief minister Uddhav Thackeray and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar during her three-day visit.

She is also scheduled to meet with industrialists in the state on December 1 with the aim of inviting investments to her home state, news agency PTI reported citing people familiar with the matter in her Trinamool Congress party.

“Mamata Banerjee will be on a three-day visit to Mumbai from tomorrow. She will hold meetings with NCP supremo Sharad Pawar and Maharashtra chief minister Uddhav Thackeray. The CM also aims to attract investments to the state,” PTI quoted a senior party leader as saying on Monday.

Her meeting with Thackeray and Pawar, two of the three coalition partners in the ruling Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) in Maharashtra, comes amid her party’s widening rift with the Congress, which is the third partner in MVA.

Also read | 'Not constitutionally mandated': Mamata on why she didn't meet Sonia Gandhi

Notably, the Trinamool has skipped an opposition leaders’ meeting called by the Congress ahead of Parliament’s Winter Session on Monday and also staged its own protests inside Parliament House demanding the Centre to repeal the three contentious farm laws. The Congress held a similar protest too, led by its president Sonia Gandhi.

The meeting also holds significance as the Trinamool is trying to expand its national footprint with Banerjee spearheading efforts to unite opposition parties against the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ahead of the 2024 general elections in the country. Several leaders joined the Trinamool recently with the defection of 12 Congress MLAs in Meghalaya, including the state’s former CM Mukul Sangma, being the latest.

In her recent political visit to Goa too, where her party is contesting the state assembly elections in 2022, popular names, including tennis star Leander Paes, were inducted into the party.

However, the party suffered a setback against the BJP in the recently concluded Tripura civic polls, where the BJP won 329 of the 334 seats in that state’s urban civic bodies. The TMC currently has one seat.

Earlier last week, Banerjee met with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and raised the issue of expanding the Border Security Force’s (BSF’s) jurisdiction in border states, including Bengal and the alleged violence in Tripura.

She also invited him to a Global Business Summit to be held in Bengal next year, according to several news reports.

(With agency inputs)