by admin | May 25, 2021 | Corporate
Union Home Minister Amit Shah paying tributes to tribal leader Birsa Munda (File Photo, Image credit: HT Bangla)
Kolkata: The reported garlanding of the statue of an unknown tribal leader instead of Birsa Munda in Bankura of West Bengal by Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Thursday has exposed the poor planning and lack of homework on the part of West Bengal unit of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Besides it has raised questions as to why this entire trip was so hurriedly planned when elections are due in next summer. Political observers are of the view that instead of making political capital of the visit the BJP may end up losing the support of crucial Adivasi votes in Jungle Mahal area of the state. The Trinamool Congress (TMC) and Adivasi organisations have come down heavily on the BJP and the Union Home Minister. The Bharat Jakat Majhi Pargana Mahal has termed it as an insult to Birsa Munda, whom they worship as Bhagwan.
Meanwhile the ruling Trinamool Congress was quick to criticize Shah alleging that the latter hardly knows anything about Bengal. The embarrassing incident provided the Trinamool leadership the fodder to attack the BJP and calling Amit Shah and BJP ‘outsiders’.
On the other hand, to contain the damage, BJP leaders said that the Home Minister had not garlanded the little-known tribal leader but he had garlanded a portrait of Birsa Munda kept at the foot of the statue.
Amit Shah, after his visit to Bankura, tweeted on Thursday: “Paid floral tributes to legendary tribal leader Bhagwan Birsa Mundaji in Bankura, West Bengal today. Birsa Mundaji’s life was dedicated to the rights and upliftment (sic) of our tribal sisters and brothers.”
It needs to be mentioned that Birsa Munda was a tribal freedom fighter and a leader of the Munda community. He led his community against the British in 1899-1900. He died in the year 1900. The community numbers a little more than three and a half lakhs in West Bengal. It has a big population in Jharkhand and Odisha too.
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Opinions, Politics
Mamata Banerjee
By Amulya Ganguli,
For a leader who enjoys a huge majority in the state assembly and faces virtually no credible challenge from her opponents, Mamata Banerjee is surprisingly insecure.
Her uncertainty about her political position could be seen in the violence unleashed by her party men during the panchayat elections last summer when 16,000 of the 50,000 seats went uncontested by the opposition parties apparently because the ruling Trinamool Congress activists scared away all her adversaries.
The Supreme Court had expressed shock over the absence – forced or otherwise – of the Trinamool Congress’s opponents in the polls. Now, the Calcutta High Court is considering her trepidations about the proposed Rath Yatras of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). While an earlier judgment rejected the state government’s plea for banning the Yatras by saying that a threat of violence as argued by the government has to be “real, not imaginary or a likely possibility”, a subseauent verdict has favoured a closer look at what the intelligence agencies are saying.
There is little doubt, however, that Mamata Banerjee nowadays regards the BJP as a greater political threat than either the Congress, which has 42 seats in the assembly against the Trinamool Congress’s 213 in the 295-member House, or the Left which has 32. The BJP, in contrast, has three.
What is clearly worrying the Chief Minister is the jump in the BJP’s vote share from three per cent in 2013 to 23 per cent in a by-election this year where it secured the second place, relegating the Congress-Left combine to the third place. Moreover, a survey has predicted the BJP’s emergence as the principal opposition party in the state.
Behind the BJP’s rise is the perception that Mamata Banerjee is rather too lenient towards the Muslims as they comprise 28 per cent of the population. In addition, there is the longstanding problem of illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, who are called “termites” by BJP president Amit Shah.
The Chief Minister’s fear probably is that the proposed Rath Yatras will raise the issue of the “termites” and call for a headcount of the “ghuspetiyas” (infiltrators) under the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in West Bengal, similar to the enumeration that has already been carried out In Assam.
Reports suggest that Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) foot soldiers are currently active in West Bengal with their propaganda in favour of an NRC on the grounds that if urgent steps are not taken, “then the Bengali Hindus will be aceannihilated”, as an RSS functionary has said.
The state government’s fears about the Rath Yatras are probably based on the fact that the processions taken out by the BJP on the occasion of Navratri with “weapons” in March had led to sporadic communal clashes, although they were not as serious as in neighbouring Bihar.
Although most people in West Bengal will consider Amit Shah’s boast of the BJP winning 22 of the 42 parliamentary seats in the state in 2019 as an instance of hyperbole, Mamata Banerjee cannot afford to take the “threat” lightly, for a rise in the BJP’s number of Lok Sabha seats from the present two with three runners-up will be a blow not only to her political prestige, but also to the state’s self-cultivated Leftist-“progressive” image.
An improved performance by the BJP will also undercut the Trinamool Congress leader’s national ambition as one of the architects of the anti-BJP mahagathbandhan (grand alliance) at the national level and of herself as a possible prime ministerial candidate.
As it is, the violence during the panchayat elections had shown her in poor light. Now, if the BJP Rath Yatras attract sizeable crowds, she will be even more on the defensive.
For a doughty fighter, who had routed the well-trenched Marxists, pushing them into a corner from where they are finding it difficult to emerge, the ascendancy is unthinkable of a north Indian party of vegetarian, cow-worshipping “Hindi-wallahs”, who revere a north Indian god like Ram, as a new member of the Trinamool Congress, who was earlier in the BJP, has said.
Arguably, Mamata Banerjee’s combative instincts are fired up when she has a battle on her hands. But the problem is that her party men are not among the most disciplined. Since many of them have switched to the Trinamool Congress from the Marxist communist party, they have a “history” of being violent.
But it is the BJP which will gain if the party is seen to be specifically targeted. As of now, the judiciary is with her, but she will be on a weak wicket if she tries too deseperately to stop what is undoubtedly the democratic right of an opposition party to take out Yatras. Her desperation can also be construed as a sign of being scared.
(Amulya Ganguli is a political analyst. The views expressed are personal. He can be reached at amulyaganguli@gmail.com)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | News, Politics
Mamata Banerjee
Kolkata : Raising the pitch for her proposed Federal Front of opposition parties, Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee on Saturday asked her party workers to launch a fortnight-long campaign from August 1 to defeat the ‘communal BJP’.
She also said her party would organise a “huge” rally in the city on January 19 next year, where leaders of the proposed Front would call for defeating the BJP at the Centre.
Addressing party workers on the party’s Martyrs’ Day rally, she said: “Bengal will show the way to India, we will show the way to Parliament in the coming days.”
Banerjee said the August campaign ‘remove communal BJP, save the country’ would spell out her party’s political programme. “On Aaugust 15 (Independence Day), all of you should raise the Tricolour and take a vow to ensure that none from the BJP raises the national flag from the Red Fort from 2019 onwards,” she told her party workers.
She appealed to Trinamool activists to work for the victory of the party in all 42 Lok Sabha seats in West Bengal in the next year’s general elections.
Banerjee said the January 19 rally would be held at the sprawling Brigade Parade ground, “from where we will be giving a call to capture power at the Centre.”
“I will bring leaders from across the country on the stage, including those from the Federal Front,” she said. “We will organise the rally in a big way…our workers should ensure a bigger turnout than today’s,” said. Banerjee
The Trinamool supremo, who has in the past made clear her national ambitions, said: “We don’t like the chair (top post) that much, we don’t care for the chair, but we care for the country, the people, the soil of the land”.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | News, Politics
Kolkata : Condemning the armed rallies organised on occasion of Ram Navami in Bengal, the CPI-M on Monday accused state and the Central governments of indulging in “competitive communalism” to divert people’s attention from major issues of life and livelihood.
The state Communist Party of India-Marxist leadership also questioned the Bengal government’s role in curbing such violence in the name of religion and accused the state ruling’s Trinamool Congress of deliberately creating space for RSS and other Sangh affiliates to hold armed processions in the state.
“There is a planned attempt to break down the secular fabric in the state. This is intentional and politically motivated. The state government, Central government and the forces behind them are intentionally fueling this politics of division, in order to divert people’s attention from their failure in addressing the more pertinent issues of life and livelihood,” CPI-M state secretary Surja Kanta Misra told reporters here.
“Another new phenomena this year has been the competitive communalism by the state ruling party and those in power at the centre.
“The Trinamool Congress also organised Ram Navami rallies across the state this year and RSS welcomed the move. We have even witnessed that BJP and Trinamool Congress leadership in north Bengal’s Alipuduar unitedly organised a Ram Navami rally. In many places Trinamool’s presence in the rallies were academic. They left spaces open for the RSS and other forces,” he alleged.
Taking a swipe at Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee for relaxing the blanket ban on armed rallies in the state, Misra claimed the relaxation encouraged Hindutva outfits to hold so many armed rallies on Ram Navami on Sunday.
Noting that the Left parties raised questions on the state administration’s role after so many people rallied with arms during Ram Navami last year, the CPI-M leader questioned how the rallyists were allowed gather so many weapons and claimed it is certain that preparations of such magnitude cannot be made in short while, bypassing the local administration.
Warning about more such rallies to be held in the state in the next few days, Misra demanded arrest of political leaders involved in such preparations and sought an all-party meeting on the issue.
“We demand these issues to be immediately addressed. The people who were leading these rallies, are leaders of certain political parties. Both the leaders of state’s ruling party and the party ruling at the centre have been involved in promoting such actions. These people should be immediately arrested. But there is no such actions yet.
“If needed, the state government should call an all party meeting to neutralise the tensions and stop rumours from spreading. There is news that similar rallies would be held at some places today (Monday) and tomorrow (Tuesday) as well. Those need to be curbed,” he added.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | News, Politics
Kolkata : Ridiculing Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee’s call for “Delhi Chalo” to her workers, West Bengal BJP chief Dilip Ghosh on Monday said after her party’s performance in Tripura polls, she should better concentrate on Bengal and stop being a big mouth.
“Trinamool has polled less than 0.3 per cent votes in Tripura, which is even less than the votes recorded under NOTA (None of the Above) in the election. But still Didi (Banerjee) dreams of going to Delhi.
“Her party has shut shop in Manipura, its shutters have come down in Tripura, the signboard has been removed in Punjab… So, she should desist from taking about Delhi, stop being a big mouth and rather concentrate on Bengal,” he said.
About Banerjee’s efforts to cobble up a third front, Ghosh said: “Who will she join hands with? RJD leader Laloo Prasad is in jail, she cannot decide whether to holds hands of the feuding father or the feuding son of the Samajwadi Party. And so, she has now joined hands with the Shiv Sena, which she has been labelling as communal all these years.”
On reports that TRS leader K.C. Rao would come to Kolkata on Tuesday and talk to Banerjee, Ghosh said: “I would caution him that before reaching Bengal, he should read Didi’s history. Whoeve she has joined hands with has been ruined. So I urge KCR, not to hold hands with her.”
Responding to Banerjee’s allegation that the BJP and the RSS cadres were throwing meat at religious placed to foment communal trouble, Ghosh said: “Banerjee is seeing nightmares in Bengal after what happened in Tripura. Be it BJP, or RSS, whoever is involved, the court will give them punishment.
“But how can she say so? Cadres of Jamaat, SIMI and Al Qaida are roaming freely in the state. They are being arrested daily,” he said.
Asked whether the Tripura verdict — where the BJP has come to power by unseating the 25-year-old Left Front regime — would impact Bengal, he said: “It is already… It has already impacted Trinamool.”
—IANS
