In what was promptly interpreted by the Opposition parties as a “not so good advertisement” of Bengal’s law and order situation under Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress the Calcutta High Court (HC) on Tuesday ordered deployment of central forces during the forthcoming panchayat elections.
The forces will be deployed in seven sensitive districts of Jalpaiguri, Murshidabad, Birbhum, parts of North 24 Parganas, South 24 Parganas, Hooghly and East Midnapore. Besides, the court also directed the State Election Commission (SEC) to install CCTV cameras in all the polling booths.
Hearing petitions filed by the BJP and the Congress, the Division Bench of Chief Justice S Sivagnanam, directed the SEC to conduct the polls with the help of central forces. However the court left the modalities of deployment on the SEC.
The Judges also would not interfere with the date of polling or timings of filing or withdrawal of nominations.
Taking strong note of the continuing violence in the run up to the polls which have been slated for July 8 and regular complaints of Opposition candidates being stopped by the ruling party miscreants from filing their nominations, the court directed the SEC to conduct the polls with the help of CAPF.
While the SEC argued that it had sufficient infrastructure to conduct the polls the Opposition cited lack of adequate police forces.
“While the State has about 80,000 police forces including the back staff there are more than 62,000 booths … there is a hopeless shortfall of policemen for a single-phase polling … even if you put two armed policemen in a booth then and a requisite number of others to man the queues and other law and order issues on the polling day then you will need at least 1.20 lakh policemen,” said BJP advocate Tarun Jyoti Tewari.
The court order came almost in tandem of massive violence at Bhangar Block II barely a few miles east of Capital Kolkata where hundreds of miscreants led by local Trinamool Congress leaders fought daylong pitched battles with the members of a defiant Indian Secular Front an alliance partner of the Left Front whose MLA Naushad Siddiqui claimed hundreds of bombs were charged throughout the day outside the BDO office at Bijayjanj market.
So much so that the Block Development Officer’s office had to be locked from inside to prevent the miscreants from entering into its premises, sources said. Several police personnel, ISF and TMC workers were injured, some of them critically in the daylong skirmish that say two sides fight with all kind of weapons including bombs, guns, brickbats, sticks and soda bottles, sources said.
While the lone ISF MLA in the State Naushad Siddiqui complained, “many of our candidates have been injured in attacks by the TMC while they were going to file their nomination,” Trinamool leader Shaukat Mollah said “it is the ISF goons who have been disturbing the nomination procedure from the morning to create terror.”
This, even as the State saw Bhangar, a village so near to Kolkata police headquarters burning as never before. An ISF candidate was shot at during the clashes while several police men received bomb injuries. Clashes also took place at Canning some 50 km south of Kolkata where the BJP and the TMC men fought with lathis and brickbats even as the saffron workers complained that they were being stopped by the TMC from filing nomination.
“If Mamata Banerjee is so confident of winning … if she is so sure of her developmental schemes then why is she afraid of letting people file nomination … what we saw the whole day was a veritable battlefield that was the trademark of medieval times,” said CPI(M) central committee member Sujan Chakrabarty.
Welcoming the High Court order State Opposition Leader Suvendu Adhikari said that “this order is a proof of what Mamata Banerjee Government is perpetrating in the State,” adding his party would file a caveat in the Supreme Court to preempt the TMC from extracting an ex parte stay order from the Apex Court.