The minister announced a set of plans and programmes which the Centre had sanctioned for Bengal. These included some railway lines, a statue of Tagore in Delhi and some funds for Nazrul's birthplace in Churulia. Also, in his enthusiasm, Mahajan announced grandly that the ECL would not be closed down and that not a single worker would be retrenched. He was quite ignorant of the fact that even as he was making such pronouncements, a colleague had dashed off a letter to the chief minister, Jyoti Basu, that the mines were simply not viable. Poor Mahajan; he had egg on his face on the very next day when Bengal's finance minister, Asim Dasgupta, briefed the Press about the nature of the ``package'' and that it was nothing but old wine in a new bottle. To cap it all, Mahajan had been proved to be saying untruths about ECL since the government was in possession of the coal minister's letter to the chief minister saying that ECL was ``not viable.''

Banerjee is naturally upset and has started crying hoarse again; this time, she has become almost sentimental. ``I will not ask for anything for Bengal any more,'' she is reported to have told a newspaper. The reason for her sudden apathy towards matters so close to her heart and her avowed sense of politics is yet unknown, but one fact is clear; Banerjee, despite her protestations, now knows as nobody else does, that she too, like the entire nation, has been taken for a long ride by the saffron Centre.