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Glare on tea churn after rout

Glare on tea churn after rout

TT, 26 May 2019, Jalpaiguri/Alipurduar: The Bengal government's delay in fixing minimum wages for tea plantation workers and local Trinamul Congress leaded' failure to boost the organisational base in the brew belt have emerged as the key reason for the party's rout in the two Lok Sabha seats in the Dooars.

The BJP trounced Trinamul and won Jalpaiguri and Alipurduar.

"The state's delay in fixing the minimum wage of tea garden workers is one of the primary reasons which led to the loss of votes in the plantations. The BJP seized on the issue and managed to bag more votes, despite the absence of a strong trade union presence. It is high time that our leaders drew up strategies to stop the BJP in the 2021 Assembly polls," said a Trinamul leader at Birpara. Trinamul sources pointed out that in the past five years, the state government implemented all possible social welfare schemes for the tea population, expedited the reopening of a number of gardens and facilitated interim hike in daily wages.

"The Centre did not take any initiative to help tea workers and their families in the past five years. Even then, the BJP managed to score over us. This is because most trade union leaders of our party were not sincere in expanding the support base in the gardens and had a wrong notion that results would be in our favour," said a Trinamul insider.

Some other Trinamul leaders, who were earlier with the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha, have criticised the party colleagues for the defeat.

"We have a clear understanding of the voters in tea gardens and local issues. But this time, we were not even called in to campaign for the party. We don't know what made district Trinamul leaders of Alipurduar and Jalpaiguri take such an approach," said a former Morcha leader.

Binod Ghatani, a former Morcha leader who is in Trinamul now and heads the task force formed for the Gorkhas in the Dooars and the Terai, said: "Ahead of the elections, we had asked the north Bengal development minister to inaugurate the community halls built for the Gorkhas in the Dooars. We also said houses built for poor members of the community should be handed over to them. But our request went unheeded. Such dillydallying created negative repercussions among people in the Dooars"It is unfortunate that despite Mamata Banerjee's sincere attempts to help the Gorkhas in the Dooars, some deterrents are coming up in the way of development and eventually affecting our vote bank," he added.

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