A meeting of Left Front at Kolkata’s Brigade Parade Ground on Sunday observed a minute’s silence for tribal-dominated Jangalmahal’s 377 “martyrs”.
A meeting of Left Front at Kolkata’s Brigade Parade Ground on Sunday observed a minute’s silence for tribal-dominated Jangalmahal’s 377 “martyrs”.
The message was loud and clear - in the run-up to the coming assembly election in West Bengal, Front will project itself as a victim of the growing political violence in the state and highlight an alleged link between Maoists and Trinamool Congress.
The pillars erected in front of the dais for the meeting, which effectively kicked off Left Front’s campaign for the election, had names of all the 377 victims of political violence.
“The way the unholy nexus between Maoists and Trinamool is snatching away the right to life by killing even women and children, deserves nothing but hatred,” Biman Bose, CPI(M) state secretary and Left Front chairman in West Bengal, told an impressive gathering of 6-7 lakh.
“Trinamool is giving oxygen to Maoists, [it is] hand-in-gloves with them in eliminating our cadres,” chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee said.
Taking a dig at Trinamool’s ‘wind of change’ slogan, he asked party cadres: “What is there to change. Do they want to take away the farmland we have been distributing among sharecroppers. Or do they want to dismantle the three-tier panchayati raj system of governance we have painstakingly created.”
Issues such as price rise, on which Left Front had recently launched a country-wide campaign, found little mention in the speeches of most leaders, except in the chief minister’s.
“Today’s meeting is a preparation for the big battle in front of us, by now you have realised its importance,” the chief minister said, indicating that the assembly election would be a survival test for Left Front, which has been in power in West Bengal for the past 34 years.
Bhattacharjee also took potshots at Trinamool chief Mamata Banerjee for her alleged silence on the recent violence in Darjeeling over Gorkha Janmukti Morcha’s demand for a separate Gorkhaland state.
“Maybe they [Trinamool] are working on some pre-poll alliance with Morcha,” he said with a smirk.
Mamata retorted: “This was Left Front’s farewell public address. The people of Egypt took 30 years to throw out an autocratic leader, here in West Bengal we are taking a little more time, 34 years, to get rid of Left Front.”
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