West Bengal Chief Minister and Trinamool Congress supremo Mamata Banerjee on Thursday said Bharatiya Janata Party said that the BJP is manipulating EVMs to increase its vote share in the state and urged her party workers to prepare for the next Lok Sabha poll as the entire country is looking forward to it.

“We are not a militant organisation like the BJP. They are arrogant and intolerant. They are religiously biased. They don’t like Muslims, Christians, Sikhs – they are even differentiating between the upper caste and the lower caste Hindus,” Banerjee said at the extended core committee meeting of TMC.

Lashing out at the BJP, she said, “They are threatening to carry out encounters. Just because they are in power in Delhi, they are talking about hurling bombs. I dare them to come and touch us. We will show them their place.”

While alleging that BJP engages in dividing people along religious lines, the Chief Minister dared the saffron party to attack her party

West Bengal BJP president Dilip Ghosh had said on Tuesday that the party would not tolerate if its workers were attacked by the Trinamool Congress and threatened to retaliate.

During a public meeting in Jalpaiguri, Ghosh had said that if BJP workers are threatened by Trinamool workers, his party will retaliate with bullets.

In his speech, which was laden with aggressive verbatim, Ghosh suggested using “encounter” as a method to counter any act of violence against the BJP workers.

Banerjee accused the BJP, the Congress, the CPI(M) and the Maoists of joining hands against the TMC in Bengal and alleged that the saffron party is manipulating EVMs to increase its vote share in the state.

Referring to the May Assembly by-poll at Maheshtala, she said 30 per cent of the EVMs used then did not work properly. “This government (at the Centre) manipulates EVM machine. Every machine will have to be monitored,” she said.

The TMC had registered a massive victory in Maheshtala by securing 1,04,818 votes, while the BJP’s vote share had witnessed a massive rise to 42,053 votes.

Banerjee asked her party cadre and workers to increase mass contact ahead of the Lok Sabha poll due next year.

(With agency inputs)