Kolkata: Daring the Centre to dismiss her government, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee vowed on Monday to not implement the citizenship law and the proposed NRC, which she said can only be enforced in West Bengal over her dead body. Banerjee, who led a mega rally in the heart of the city, alleged that a few people were paid by the BJP to perpetrate violence in the state, even as she blamed some powers from outside West Bengal "acting as friends" of the Muslim community for vandalism and arson.

The TMC supremo, who led the rally from Red Road to Jorasanko Thakur Bari, the ancestral house of Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore in north Kolkata, was joined by thousands of supporters with placards like "No CAA" and "No NRC" "There are some forces from outside the state, who are acting as friends of minorities and have indulged in this violence. These forces are stooges of the BJP, don't fall into their trap," Banerjee said in an apparent reference to Asaduddin Owaisi's AIMIM with whom she got into a war of words recently. "As long as I am alive, I will never implement the citizenship law or NRC in the state. You can very well dismiss my government or put me behind bars but I will never implement this black law. We will continue to protest democratically till this law is scrapped. If they want to implement it in Bengal they will have to do it over my dead body," she said. If the BJP thinks it can "bulldoze" everybody to implement the law, then they are wrong, she asserted.