As more and more evidence comes to light in the Saradha scam, the Chief Minister and other leaders of the ruling party are losing their cool and making intolerant and inflammatory statements. The Chief Minister herself wasresponsible for deliberately purging her election campaign of any political content, said Left Front Chairman and CPI (M) West Bengal State Committee Secretary Biman Basu at a press meet at the CPI (M) State Committee office at Muzaffar Ahmed Bhavan, Kolkata on April 27. .
Biman Basu pointed out that throughout the last week the Trinamool Congress had scaled up its attacks on CPI (M) workers and supporters. They were directly hindering the Left Front’s campaign. He cited examples from Bhangor, Keshpur, Chandrakona, Arambagh, Durgapur, Jadavpur, Goghat, Udaynarayanpur to illustrate his statement.
Basu remarked that in the past few days, leaders of the ruling party including the CM had been tactfully avoiding any serious political discussion. It had previously resorted to entertaining people with talks of a ‘Federal Front’, but even that petered out after the Saradha issue resurfaced. Instead,recent comments issued by the TMC and is leaders were directed more in order to attract harsh reactions. Not only were the TMC leaders targeting the former Left government, they were sometimes even lashing out at the media. Biman Basu said that while it was a fact that Saradha began in the Left reign, the intimate dealings of the chit fund with TMC leaders also began at that time. Pictures from 2010 were being made public now.
BimanBasu said that the Chief Minister was trying to reduce the Lok Sabha elections to the level of voting in some club. Even the employees of the Election Commission were being attacked. These actions, he said, could only be conducted by people who did not believe in democracy. Basu said that the ruling party’s leaders were solely responsible for the atmosphere of terror pervading in the state. The police had been reduced to the status of TMC party cadre. He also said that calling oneself a ‘poor man’s party’ and ‘an icon of honesty’ on one hand and spending crores on helicopters and chartered flights for campaigning as was practiced by the TMC smacked of downright hypocrisy.
On the morning of April 27BimanBasuled a rally in Joka, an area where there has been an unwritten fatwa against the red flag ever since the TMC came to power in 2011. The rally was in support of the Left Front nominated CPI (M) candidate from South Kolkata constituency, Nandini Mukherjee. The rally set out from Kabardanga, heading through Julpiya road, carrying a strong message of resistance to the terror politics unleashed by the TMC. People came forward to tell Biman Basu and Nandini of the stifling conditions they lived in. They had been told that their shops would be closed down if they attended the Left Front rally. Yet a few thousand people had braved the threats and taken part. Biman Basu addressed the gathering, reminding them of the crisis brought about in their lives by the neoliberal policies propagated by the Congress and BJP, reminding them of price rise, corruption, the terrible memories of the riots in Gujarat, and reiterating the call to build a government that will follow alternative policies that will protect the rights of the common people.