Anna Hazare finds it difficult to support Didi

Virtually withdrawing his three-week-long endorsement to Mamata Banerjee’s national ambitions, Anna Hazare said on Friday that he did not turn up at the rally in Ramlila Ground here last Wednesday, because not many people had shown up to listen to him and the Trinamool chief.

Hazare said that it had now become difficult for him to support Mamata or her party’s nationwide campaigns for the forthcoming Lok Sabha polls.

“Now, some such people, who deceived me, have got associated with Mamata Banerjee, which makes it difficult for me to support her,” the veteran social activist said, when a journalist asked him if he would continue to support the Trinamool supremo.

He also said that the Trinamool Congress had been requested not to use his name for the party’s campaign for the forthcoming Lok Sabha polls.

Hazare and Mamata were expected to jointly address a “Janatantra Rally” at Ramlila Ground in Delhi on Wednesday. Though both came to the national capital to attend the rally, Hazare did not turn up and Banerjee was left alone to address the thin crowd.

Though the Trinamool was initially projecting the rally as the launch of its nationwide campaign for the parliamentary polls, the party changed tack after it turned into a damp squib. Mamata herself, claimed that the rally was conceived by Hazare and organised by his aides, while she was just invited to address it along with the elderly Gandhian.

“When I came to Delhi, by 12 noon, I found out there were only 2,000 or 2,500 people in the rally. I thought that something was amiss. The Ramlila Ground was teeming with people, when I had staged protests there. This was the mistake, this was the deceit,” said Hazare. Hazare also said a journalist, who later became one of his aides, played a key role in getting him publicly declare his support for Mamata in a news conference on February 19.

The social activist said that the journalist had misled him and Mamata.

While he had been told that the rally at was being organised by the Trinamool and he would have to address it. Likewise, Banerjee had been told that it had been arranged by his aides and she would have to join him.