The Trinamool Congress has decided to make 130th Constitution Amendment Bill a big issue ahead of the next year’s elections. A campaign will start to that effect after the festive seasons, insiders said.
The Bill proposes removal of ministers including Prime Minister, Chief Ministers if one remains behind the bar for more than 30 days in graft cases. In its campaign the party is likely to link the new Bill to the proposed Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls in the State.
“This Bill is a ploy to divert public attention and push the opposition leaders to the defensive... but this is not going to happen the TMC will fight tooth and nail the dirty way of imposing the SIR in Bengal, if any name will be deleted from the voters’ list the TMC will rise up in revolt, genuine voters cannot be victimised like the way it has happened in Bihar,” senior leader and spokesperson Kunal Ghosh has said adding the leadership would tell the people how the BJP was planning to conduct SIR under the shadow of the Bill.
TMC general secretary Abhishek Banerjee too had said that his party would take one lakh people from Bengal and gherao the Election Commission of India should the names of voters were deleted in the name of SIR. Incidentally Banerjee won the 2024 general elections from Diamond Harbour parliamentary constituency by a whopping margin of more than seven lakh votes amid allegations that lakhs of names — including those of illegal Bangladeshi infiltrators — had been included in the electoral rolls.
Earlier Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee had made it clear that she would not send any Trinamool Congress representative to the Joint Parliamentary meeting
concerning the 130th Constitutional Amendment Bill. Calling the JPC a “farce,” Abhishek who is also the nephew of Mamata Banerjee said “we oppose the 130th Constitution Amendment Bill at the stage of introduction, we are not nominating anyone from the All India Trinamool Congress.”
His party colleague and Rajya Sabha MP Derek O’ Brien too said that the Bill was being introduced to distract attention from SIR.
He wrote, “The Modi coalition pushing to form this JPC to examine an ‘unconstitutional bill’ is a stunt performed to create a distraction from Special Intensive Revision (SIR — vote chori), Modi-Shah Have Turned Parliament JPCs into stunts.”
Citing grounds of not joining the KPC he said that these committees were “skewed towards the ruling majority” because of their numbers in the House. There was no point joining them as the Opposition views would be demolished by simple numbers, he said.
However the TMC leadership in Kolkata said that the Bill if placed before Parliament would not get a passage on account of the required quorum to get it passed.
“As it is a non-issue in terms of its possibility of getting passed it is a stunt and nothing more in the present context, presently we are more concerned about vote chori (theft of votes) and that we will succeed in containing in Bengal by stopping an illegal SIR in its way,” Ghosh said.