LF Candidates Announced in KMC election

LEFT Front chairman Biman Basu announced early in the afternoon of April 17 names of the candidates put up by the Left Front for the corporation polls of the metropolis to be held on May 30.

The CPI(M) has put up 96 candidates, CPI 14, FB 11, RSP 10, M-FB, SP, DSP, RJD (LF supported) one each, and BBC and RCPI-- one each.

There are 92 new candidates or 65 per cent of the total. Most of the candidates are young. There are 67 women candidates who have been put up in seats over and above those reserved for women. Biman Basu said that the Left Front was satisfied with the working of the corporation in the present term that had started on and from 2005.

The present mayor Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharya, who is a lawyer of note, is not contesting the polls this time, and Biman Basu clarified to say that the post of a legal authority was being thought of about him.(INN)

Redistribution of Land in Urban Areas Commences

THE Bengal Left Front government leads by far the rest of the state governments in terms of seizing ceiling-surplus land in rural areas and redistributing them amongst the poor.

Presently, a plan has been drawn up for a similar land redistribution among the poor and the needy, especially refugee families in the cities and townships.

The following are the chief characteristics of the programme:

• Refugee families would receive unconditional proprietorship of land
• The families who are not refugees but are living on refugee land shall receive long-term lease-based land rights
• Those of the urban poor who have been residing in unused khas land for two decades or more shall get proprietorship of the land plots at the cost Re one for a period of 99 years
• The thika tenancy act has been suitably modified to benefit the poor further
• Housing estates are built to provide shelter to the urban poor and for the people belonging to the lower-income groups
• It is now a legal right of the people living in slums and of the urban poor in general to claim benefits of better services and infrastructural facilities.(INN)

Maoists Kill SFI Leader in West Midnapore

ON April 4, goons of the Maoist-Trinamul combine took yet another life, this time of Comrade Partha Biswas, secretary of the Harda local committee of Students’ Federation of India (SFI) in West Midnapore district of West Bengal. He was also the joint secretary of Belpahari zonal committee of the organisation.

In the evening on the day, armed Maoists surrounded Comrade Biswas, aged 25, in his village Malabati and fired two bullets in his head. A commerce graduate from Shilda College in West Midnapore, he had been active in organising the students in particular and the common people in general against the Maoist-Trinamul menace in Belpahari region. He had been vocal against the politics of killing the Maoists and the Trinamul Congress are pursuing.

Comrade Partha Biswas happens to be the fourth martyr of the SFI after the last Lok Sabha elections. Earlier, NDF fundamentalists had taken the life of Comrade A B Bijesh, a member of the Thrissur district secretariat of SFI in Kerala. In the district of West Midnapore alone in West Bengal, the Maoist-Trinamul combine had earlier killed two leading SFI comrades --- Comrade Abhijit Mahato and Comrade Tilak Tudu.

Comrade Partha Biswas was the tenth student who got killed in West Bengal after the parliamentary elections --- either by the Maoists or by the TMC.

In a statement issued on April 5, the SFI’s central executive committee strongly condemned the brutal killing of Comrade Partha Biswas and appealed to all the democratic minded people to isolate the proponents of such violence and killings. Dipping its banner of Independence, Democracy and Socialism in memory of Comrade Partha Biswas, the SFI CEC has called upon all its units to protest this heinous killing in all the campuses of the country. It has pledged to keep up the ideological political resistance to the bankrupt and reactionary politics of the self- styled Maoists who are killing the Left activists and supporters at the behest of the anti-Left alliance led by the Trinamul Congress in West Bengal. The SFI CEC has also extended heartfelt condolences to the family and friends of Comrade Partha Biswas in this hour of tragic loss.(INN)