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Updated: May 28, 2019 22:15 IST

Capping a season of bitter electoral acrimony, West Bengal chief minister and Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee on Tuesday said that she will try to attend the swearing-in ceremony of Prime Minister Narendra Modi on May 30.

“We will attend the programme. There are certain ceremonial programmes where attending amounts to Constitutional courtesy. But there is only one day in between. We will try to attend,” Mamata Banerjee said at the state secretariat.

She also said that the invitation to attend the programme reached her on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, Telangana chief minister K Chandrashekhar Rao and newly elected Andhra Pradesh chief minister YS Jagan Mohan Reddy have already decided to attend the oath-taking ceremony as per their offices. However, Odisha, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan chief ministers have received invitations but were yet to decide if they would attend or not.

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders in Bengal welcomed Mamata’s statement. “If good sense prevails in her, we will welcome it,” BJP national secretary Rahul Sinha said.

The campaign for the Lok Sabha elections witnessed bitter exchanges between PM Narendra Modi and Mamata Banerjee. PM Modi alleged that West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee and her nephew Abhishek were downright extortionists. The Bengal chief minister, on the other hand hit back by prescribing “sit-ups for him holding his ears”.

Words such as “liar”, “fraud”, “thugs” and “thieves” targeted at senior most leaders of political parties flew thick and fast from public rallies and personal attacks became very common.

Incidentally, Mamata Banerjee did not attend the Prime Minister’s swearing-in ceremony in May 2014.

In West Bengal, too, when she was in the opposition, the Trinamool Congress chief never attended any programme of the state government. During her role as the opposition leader, she sat across the table with the ruling Marxists only twice -- once to discuss the impasse at Nandigram in 2007 and in 2008 when she held a meeting with chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee at the Raj Bhavan at the initiative of Gopal Krishna Gandhi, the then governor, to discuss the land crisis in Singur.