With eyes on 2014 rural polls, Mamata woos Darj district

Pramod Giri, THT, Siliguri, 26 October 2013: The large crowd at the meeting of chief minister Mamata Banerjee at Shiv Mandir here on Saturday indicates that the Trinamool Congress may well give the CPI(M) a tough fight during the 2014 panchayat polls in Darjeeling. 

In fact, the party seems to have already started its preparation for that contest. 

The presence of more than 10,000 people at the small ground of Narsingha Vidhyapith has come in the wake of the Trinamool forming the board in the Siliguri Mahakuma Parishad (SMP) after three of the Congress members in the SMP joined the party and a CPI(M) member helped it oust the Left after 24 years. 

The CPI(M) was running the SMP till recently when Jyoti Tikri, a senior CPI(M) leader and the sahakari sabhadhipai in the SMP voted in favour of the no-confidence motion brought by three Trinamool members against the CPI(M)’s sabhadhipati in the SMP. Later, Tirki was elected as the sabhadhipati with the support of the three Trinamool members even though she is yet to join the party officially. 

It may be recalled that the Mahakuma Parishad is the highest tier of the panchayat system in Darjeeling district as the district has no zilla parishad while the three hill sub-divisions have a separate administrative system in the name of Gorkhaland Territorial Administration (GTA). 

The SMP is constituted by four panchayat samities — Matigara, Naxalbari, Kharibari and Phasidewa. 

The Trinamool, which had failed to win even a single SMP seat in the 2009 election, has been campaigning extensively in the rural belts. 

Many elected members of parties such as the Congress and the CPI(M) in the four panchayat samities have already joined the Trinamool. 

Political observers believe that Saturday’s programme at Shiv Mandir was organised keeping in mind the next year’s panchayat election. 

The chief minister was also intent on winning over the ruling residents, announcing scores of projects. She also distributed power tillers, pump sets to farmers and cycles to students and education loans to students belonging to the minority community. 

Meanwhile, the local journalists were at the receiving end on Saturday with most of them being denied the opportunity to cover the chief minister’s programme. 

Despite issuing press passes both for the accredited and non-accredited journalists, the police did not allow nonaccredited journalists and photographers to enter the venue. 

In Siliguri, more than 80% journalists and photographers do not have accreditation cards as the process of getting them is cumbersome.