Not to stay behind NCP supremo Sharad Pawar in making provocative speeches, senior Trinamool Congress leader and former Union Minister Saugata Roy on Monday, told his partymen to pay the CPI(M) back in their own coins “as they did to us in 2009 lok Sabha polls by capturing the booths”.
The veteran leader, who was addressing a workers’ rally, wondered whether “you will forget whatever happened to you when they were in power” egging on the workers to browbeat the Marxists to silence “if they talk too much while campaigning for their candidates.”
The former professor told his comrades that “the CPI(M) used to dominate the polls and bark us to silence during their days” adding “though I am a believer of non-violence can’t I ask you to remind them of their earlier misdeeds and ask them to keep mum because the Central forces would not operate inside the gullies and mohallas!”
Earlier Pawar had spoken on similar lines about one voter casting two votes.Reacting rather sharply to Roy’s statement Opposition leaders said they would take the issue to the EC “as it speaks volumes of the kind of peaceful governance they are giving in Bengal.”
Said CPI(M) leader Sujan Chakrabarty “he is simply provoking his men to do violence like the way their Birbhum district president asked his men to burn th e Opposition houses and bomb police vehicles leading to subsequent murders.”