A day before Bengal goes to polls for the fifth phase on Saturday the security forces on Friday seized two dozen bombs from various clubs in Kolkata. One of these clubs from where 14 bombs were unearthed is situated barely a mile away from Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s Kalighat residence.
Though the occupants of the club at Alipore Road — in Banerjee’s Bhawanipore constituency — fled the spot police recovered Trinamool Congress festoons and cut-outs of the Chief Minister from its interiors. A couple of miles away the police seized another lot of ten bombs from a club at Tiljala in Ballygunge constituency from where senior Minister Subroto Mukherjee is contesting.
Following strict orders from the Election Commission the police and the Central forces had started combing operations in all the 53 constituencies spread over three districts which were going to polls on Saturday.
While the police would not make any official comments the Opposition said these clubs were among the hundreds of those which had received yearly grants from the State Government. In fact TMC MP Sudip Bandopadhyay had in a recent speech appealed to the clubs to “reciprocate for the favour you had received from the Government all these years and help us win the polls.”
The fate of 349 candidates including 43 women will be sealed on Saturday. The 53 seats where the elections will be held are spread over South 24 Parganas, Kolkata and Hooghly.
The fate of a number of heavyweights including Mamata Banerjee will be sealed on in the fifth round of polls. Apart from this the fates of a number of Trinamool heavyweights like Subroto Mukherjee, Firhad Hakim, Kolkata Mayor Sobhan Chatterjee and Iqbal Ahmed who were purportedly seen accepting bribe in the Narada sting footage will be decided in this phase.
While Banerjee is contesting against Deepa Dasmunshi a former Union Minister of the Congress and Netaji’s grand nephew Chandra Kumar Bose from BJP, other heavy-duty politicians in the fray are State Ministers Arup Biswas, Partho Chatterjee, Javed Khan, former Minister and now a Trinamool candidate Abdur Rezzak Mollah, former CPI(M) MPs Sujan Chakrabarty, Samik lahiri, former left minister Kanti Ganguli and his colleague Rabin Deb and film star Debashri Roy.
About 1.2 crore voters will exercise their franchise at over 14,500 booths. Apart from clamping Section 144 in the three districts, the Election Commission had deployed about 68,000 central forces who will be assisted by 20,000 State police personnel.
Polling will be held from 7 AM to 6 PM at over 14,500 booths for the 1.2 crore electorate.
Meanwhile, the Election Commission further tightened the screw on mischief mongers not only by ordering searches on likely hideouts and randomly checking the vehicles at various points but also directing the police to intern (nazarband) jailed Trinamool leader Madan Mitra who was currently undergoing treatment in SSKM Hospital.
Mitra has not only been put under electronic surveillance but he has been debarred from using phones or meeting outsiders other than his family members.
In a related incident the Calcutta High Court on Friday directed the Commission and the Police to ensure that the residents of Basanti village in South 24 Parganas are able to vote. The residents who were under threat from the Trinamool goons for the past one month had petitioned the Court to secure their rights after repeated pleas made to the Commission and the police failed, sources said.
