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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. Author of Cyber Scams in India, Digital Arrest, The Money Trap and The Human Hack

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.

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