Mamata Banerjee following in left’s footsteps
The many electoral malpractices, the blatant abuse of state power and the large-scale violence which marked the recent civic poll in West Bengal should worry every citizen across the country. Booth capturing, poll rigging, bomb blasts and assaults on party activists, poll staff, police personnel and even the public, were reported from all over the State — an ignominious repeat of the 2014 lok Sabha poll, where too the Trinamool Congress was accused of brazenly undermining the democratic process in West Bengal. There were reports of violence from Siliguri in the north to Kandi and Katwa in the south, and even from areas around Kolkata such as Birati, New Barrackpore, North Dum Dum, Kamarhati, Basirhat and Titagarh.
In North 24 Parganas, one voter suffered a bullet wound while a two-year-old child was injured in a bomb blast in the same district. In fact, bombs went off in at least 10 different locations across the State, as rival party workers clashed with each other. Three Congress members were injured while BJP leader and actor Rupa Ganguly was previously attacked by political goons on the campaign trail. Some senior left leaders, including former Ministers, also complained that they were being threatened and intimidated. In Nadia district, a policewoman was attacked, and there were several reports of poll officials being intimated. Such was the level of lawlessness that even the Trinamool Congress was not spared — one party worker was shot dead in Bardhaman.
Poll violence is, of course, hardly a new phenomenon in West Bengal. In the 34 years that the left ruled the State before Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee took charge in 2011, the communists had in place a well-oiled electoral machinery that routinely made a mockery of the voting process. From violently removing poll officials, to threatening Opposition supporters on the eve of polling, to using more subtle techniques of booth capturing, like having dummy voters que-up outside the booth in slow-moving lines so as to tire out actual workers from casting their vote, the left has done it all. Now, the Trinamool Congress is not just following in its footsteps but taking electoral fraud and violence to an all new low.
This doesn't seem surprising at all when one considers the fact that the lumpen elements, who once did the left's dirty work, have moved en masse to the Trinamool Congress. But since the Trinamool Congress is a relatively young party, it does not have the requisite organisational framework at the middle and upper levels to keep the goons in check. This is one of the reasons, apart from the systematic weakening of the police force by the Mamata Banerjee administration, why the overall law and order system, not just during a pre-poll scenario, in West Bengal, has deteriorated so rapidly in the past four years. If this is becoming a trend, one can easily imagine what the 2016 Assembly election, expected to be a tough fight for the ruling party, will look like.