Self contradictory manifesto’s of electoral alliance partners in West Bengal

Trinamool and the Congress manifesto reveal the duality of characters and the opportunist nature of the alliance of West Bengal opposition

KOLKATA: No sane person will believe this. Some excerpts from the manifesto of the Trinamool Congress. “Why shouldn’t the Digha - transformed into Goa? Why shouldn’t the north Bengal be Switzerland. Why should’nt Kolkata be London? If brought to power Trinamool will work on programme to make it possible. The stark absurdness of her manifesto is now a laughing stock for even for the Congress leaders- her alliance partners.

Though it is not envisable how presently a single representative party in the parliament Trinamool congress will come to power in the near future. But if again counting on vague probability she thinks that this is possible pillion riding on Congress’s back then also questions are bound to arise as to why the election promise of TMC is diagonally opposite of what the congress is saying. While the disinvestment process at the Centre and the state had gathered momentum under the NDA government and the Congress government of which she was part many times at election time this year facing the onslaught of the people against her Zero policies on anything of national importance she suddenly has encountered upon the benefit of having PSU units .

Though her alliance partner Congress has kept Mum about the privatization and her one time ally BJP is openly for privatisation of national resources. More importantly she has not uttered a single word against the BJP or Congress. Perhaps she wants to keep open all the sides open after the election depending on the national results. Recently chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya had said that even the ordinary congress workers of the state does not any confidence as to whether Trinamool Congress will stick with Congress after the post poll scenario. The fickle minded nature of Trinamool supremo where she has switched sides time and again has underlined this basic nature of unprincipled politics that TMC at west Bengal had been playing. Time and again her brand of politics has been negated by the people of the state but she has not changed a little bit even after the election verdicts.

More than 75% of the promises made by the TMC supremo have been centred on the state and any question of the national politics was not even mentioned there. But one thing for sure even the Trinamool which has given zero explanation for his antidevelopment roles and the promises that she has made , even has not been able to undermine the success of the West Bengal’s success under Left Front government in the field of agriculture ,though she has attributed this success to the climate of the state? On one side she has demanded why new industries are not coming up on another side she is hell bent on creating roadblocks in the path to the state’s development. In the question of infrastructural development also she had to play to the gallery by refusing to pronounce her stance of not letting the national Highways to come up.

Instead she has demanded that the state should advance in industrialization when she has started campaigning against the PCPIR project in Nayachar which has the potential to provide employment to over 1 lakh people in the state. While on the disinvestments and the privatization issue TMC, in face has said that they too want the disinvestment process to be stopped but in the past as the part of NDA she never raised a single objection to the rampart privatization effort of the then disinvestment minister Arun Shourie.

On the communal amity she said she wants that communal harmony to be maintained but as cabinat Minister in Bajpayee government she did not raised any objection to the Godhra carnage and still she thinks that Narendra Modi is the best Chief minster and Gujarat the ideal example of a state where development and peace exists. She never has demanded that the woman’s reservation Bill be passed in parliament but the politics of compulsion as she fears of getting caught in the eyes of the voters of the state has co0mpeelwed her to put the woman’s reservation issue within her demands.

While her electoral alliance partner the Congress government is reducing the interest of pensioners across the state she fearing people’s onslaught had to mention this demand in the election manifesto. Again an example of duality. She, on one hand has condemned the farmer’s suicides in Maharashtra? Will the government there accede to the demand of their partner? In case of Value added tax while she wants it to be abolished the congress on the other hand wants to strengthen the system of VAT.

In all, unable to face the people of the state the Trinamool too has to enact to play acting echoing the demands of the Leftists. But her hide and her act in the past won’t allow the people of the state to believe in her. Riding on anti leftist platform her poll promise had been a clear cut effort in hoodwinking the people of the state. As time and again the politics of the ruling class of the country has been negated by the people of West Bengal, her ploy of winning over the common people of the state by adhering to the demands of Leftists like 50% allocation of Central resources to the states have failed as the initial reaction of the common people has ridiculed this attempt of Mamata.

However, on the issue of giving support to the divisive forces the manifesto comes out of the way to show its clear support to the Maoists the separatists and the other cessionist elements of the state.On the last part of her mainifesto, her clear intention of hood winking the people has been pronounced, as she had said that the aim of her is to reduce the strength of the Leftists in the parliament as it is they who are creating road blocks to implement the various anti people measures of the successive Central government . So in the end she has admitted that her aim is to pave the way for elimination of the leftists as a deciding factor in the Central politics.

By SANDIP

OPPOSITION SUBVERTS INTEGRITY, ENCOURAGES DIVISISM:BUDDHADEB

SILIGURI: Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee on election tour across a vast stretch of north Bengal was clear in pointing out that the opposition in Bengal worked to organise, hearten, and applaud divisism of every kind including territorial separatism. It is the CPI (M) and the Left, Buddhadeb told the various gatherings he addressed between 28 and 31 March, which is ready to go in for sacrifices of every kind to ensure that Bengal remains integrated and a united entity.

The Trinamulis and the scions of Pradesh Congress, said Buddhadeb, were eager and willing to witness the prosperity and political flowering of such dangerous political devices as the call for ‘greater’ Coochbehar, for a separate ‘Gorkhaland,’ and for a ‘free’ state of Kamptapur, for a separate western Bengal centering around Lalgarh.

The separatist ‘Gorkha Janamukti Morcha’ (GJM) was ready to encroach upon the dooars and the terai with impunity for the sake of building up a separate Gorkhali entity that was conceptually and behaviourally a wrong notion from the first to the last of the premises they fatuously advanced. ‘We,’ said Buddhadeb ‘have told the Dooars adivasi organisations that had become very angry at the GJM’s move, that you should maintain calm and be of orderly conduct, for otherwise, the purpose of the GJM would have been served.’ We are aware of the problems that the adivasis face and whether it was the dearth of Hindi-medium school or the issue of closed and sick cha bagicha, the LF government would look into them for a fruitful but amicable solution.’

The CPI (M) and the LF stood for unity – of the plains and the hills, and of the plains people and the hills people in all their colourful existence. Buddhadeb appealed once again to the GJM leaders not to go in for separatism for that would not solve whatever anguish they nourished in the hearts-and-minds, and whatever was the sort of deprivation they might nurture.

‘We are ready to provide the hill area with more administrative and financial powers for developmental purposes, but who would stand to gain if you go in for separatism? Has the carving away of Jharkhand from Bihar been of any help to the people of either of the two neighbouring states?’ asked Buddhadeb.

Buddhadeb asked the Pradesh Congress leaders to come clean of they could on the issue of a separate hill district. The Congress speaks in one tone in the terai and dooars and in quire another in the hills. This was duplicity and the victims are the common people, especially the poor who become more and more confused and angry at being played as ducks-and-drakes.

Recalling the 1970s when the violent Naxalite (later the ‘Congxalite’) movement swept Bengal and the 1980s when the Gorkhaland movement under the counter-progressive stewardship of the GNLF, shed the blood of the poor, the bourgeois parties had silently provided succour and encouragement to the politics of destruction. Those days would be allowed to come back and haunt the poor of the province again, asserted Buddhadeb firmly. In the upcoming Lok Sabha polls, the electorate must vote for peace, for amity, for progress, for development.

Later fielding a plethora of questions, some mundane, others facetious, only a few that could be deemed having political content, Buddhadeb said that the prospects of a strong Third Front grew fast every day, every week. The BJP a vicious outfit that believed in religious fundamentalism of the physical kind (e.g., a young BJP leader’s horrendous threats to non-Hindu communities, uttered brazenly in front of rolling TV cameras) was losing ground fast. Allies were dropping off the ship-ran-aground called the Congress. The resultant political vector clearly worked for the repository of popular trust in the secular-democratic Third Front with the Left and the CPI (M) playing the role of a catalyst.

Elsewhere in Darjeeling the LF’s CPI (M) candidate for the seat Jibesh sarkar was heckled by the GJM but nonetheless, he also received a cheerful welcome from the masses of the hill station, and his campaign up in the hills was such a success that the Bengal CPI (M) would extend electioneering in such important hill towns as Kurseong, and Kalimpong shortly, urban development minister Ashok Bhattacharyya, a long-time Party activist of Siliguri and Darjeeling assured us.