oppn parties West Bengal: All Parties Must Work To Hold Peaceful Elections

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  • For the first time ever, Mukesh Ambani buys a 29% stake in Gautam Adani's Mahan Energen, a subsidiary of Adani Power to source 500MW of electricity from the company's power plant in MP
  • Stocks continue to rise on Thursday - Sensex gains 639 points to 73635 and Nifty 203 points to 22326
  • Golf - Indian Open: 3 Indians at tied 14th as Joost Luiten takes the lead with a wonderful 7-under 65
  • IPL: RR beat DC by 12 runs as Riyan Parag (84 off just 45 balls) shines
  • SP drops two candidates owing allegiance to Azam Khan from Rampur and Moradabad
  • In Assam, a controversy erupted after a picture of UPPL leader Benjamin Basumatary, lying on a stack of Rs 500 notes circulated on social media. UPPL is an ally of the BJP
  • AAP's Jalandhar-West MP Sushil Kumar Rinku joins the BJP. He was the only AAP Lok Sabha MP
  • Supreme Court dismisses Centre's plea to review its 2023 verdict in the PMLA case
  • Close save for passengers as they remain unhurt after the wings of two planes graze at Kolkata airport. Pilots derostered and inquiry ordered by DGCA
  • Bengal BJP leader Dilip Ghosh gets notice from the EC as well as the BJP for making ugly remarks about Mamata Banerjee's parentage
  • Sadanand Vasanth Date, who faught terrorists in the 26/11 attack and was awarded the Preisent's Police medal, has been appointed the head of the NIA
  • Centre will borrow Rs 7.5L cr in the first six months of FY25, nearly 50% of the target for the full year
  • 25 stocks, including SBI, will see same day trade settlements from today in the world's fastest settlement mode in both BSE and NSE
  • Stocks recover smartly on Wednesday: Sensex rises 526 points to 72996 and Nifty 118 points to 22123
  • Tennis: Rohan Bopanna-Matthew Ebden reached the semifinals of the Miami Open
Delhi Lt Governor Vinai Kumar Saxena says government cannot be run from jail, hints at President's Rule in the capital ////// In a dangerous incident, the wings of two planes grazed while taxiing on the runway at Kolkata airport, all passengers were safe but DGCA ordered an inquiry and the pilots were derostered
oppn parties
West Bengal: All Parties Must Work To Hold Peaceful Elections

By Sunil Garodia
First publised on 2021-04-12 03:00:24

About the Author

Sunil Garodia Editor-in-Chief of indiacommentary.com. Current Affairs analyst and political commentator.

What happened in Sitalkuchi in the Cooch Behar in West Bengal was a direct result of the confrontationist and divisive politics being carried out by both the main players, the TMC and the BJP. Such is the heat generated by the adverse campaigning by both parties that communities are pitched against each other and the Central forces are being treated as 'disrupters' by workers of the TMC and voters who support that party.

Soon after the Election Commission (EC) decided to hold the elections in the state in a record eight phases and deployed an unprecedented number of Central security force units, it was clear that TMC chief Mamata Banerjee was not going to take it lying down.  She has always maintained that it was a conspiracy against the state and that the EC was acting at the behest of home minister Amit Shah. But when she started castigating the role of the Central forces and asked party workers and voters to gherao the forces if they tried to disrupt the poll process, she was inviting trouble.

Poll violence in the state is nothing new. But what happened in Sitalkuchi was avoidable. Reports suggest that when a 14-year-old boy fainted outside a booth (his mother had gone to vote inside and asked him to wait there) and was being attended to by others, the security personnel came out to see what the commotion was about. They offered to shift the boy to hospital. But soon a crowd gathered and tempers started rising.

The accounts differ from here. Some reports say the villagers started advancing towards the security personnel (who had called for reinforcements seeing the size of the mob) and tried to snatch their rifles. The jawans first fired two rounds in the air to disperse them but when this did not deter the mod and they kept on advancing, the jawans fired at them, killing 4 and injuring many others. The other report, mainly propagated by the TMC, says that it was an unprovoked firing from the jawans. Mamata Banerjee has said that if there was trouble, why was lathi-charge or tear gas not resorted to? Why did the jawans fire?

It is unfortunate that the common man has to bear the brunt of fighting between two equally-positioned political forces in the state. In the no-holds-barred campaigning being conducted in the state, all decorum has been thrown to the winds and charges and counter-charges are being made and these do not spare even institutions or security forces. The confrontation has been bloody. This has to end. West Bengal must learn to hold elections peacefully.