Pre-poll ferment

SNS, Editorial | 25 November, 2015: Six months before the Assembly elections, rural Bengal is in turmoil with almost daily bouts of violence. The portents are direly ominous, indeed suggestive of the gradually evolving anarchy on the eve of polls. From his constituency of Narayangarh in West Midnapore, where the Leader of the Opposition, Suryakanta Mishra, was manhandled to volatile Birbhum via the ransacking of the CPI-M’s zonal office in Tarakeswar, ruling party activists have made it pretty obvious that they are determined not to allow space to any political force. That resolve appears to have been steeled after the arrest of Trinamul activists in the wake of the assault on the Chief Judicial Magistrate, Suri, the headquarters of Birbhum district.

The fish-and-chips bonhomie with CPI-M leaders at Nabanna some months back has been reduced to irrelevance; for both parties it was a convoluted exercise in self-deception. Particularly despicable was the grievous injury and public humiliation suffered by the former CPI-M MLA, Dhiren Lett, at Mayureswar last Saturday for having participated in a jatha. He was forced to hold his ears and pledge that he would not associate himself with the CPI-M.

The almost relentless violence against the Left’s “mass contact programme” would suggest that the Trinamul leadership has fielded its henchmen, notably Anubrata Mondol, to scuttle even a feeble attempt at resurgence by the CPI-M. In the aftermath of the 2011 debacle, such programmes were planned as a belated essay towards “course correction” and Trinamul is now seemingly determined to scuttle the exercise at its threshold.

In the calculated absence of the rule of law, the Left has its back to the wall further still - a grim reality that chimes oddly with visuals of Mamata Banerjee and Sitaram Yechury sharing the dais in Patna during Nitish Kumar’s swearing-in as Chief Minister. Miss Banerjee’s party has ramped up the pressure on the CPI-M in the wake of faltering governance, most recently the High Court’s rap on the knuckles in the case against Madan Mitra. Whether or not the Assembly elections are conducted in the manner that the Salt Lake civic elections were in October, political opponents have reason to find events deeply unnerving.

And the reported involvement of a civic police volunteer with Trinamul connections during the attack on the CPI-M’s rally in Birbhum has made the waters murkier still. A senior officer sounds pathetic when he claims that the volunteer can’t be arrested because of his political links. Altogether the effort appears to be to ensure that an election in which the ruling party is deemed the front-runner is reduced to a one-horse race.