Left caution over call for flagless march : Troubles mount for Mamata in chant for justice

 BJP leaders such as Sukanta Majumdar and Suvendu Adhikari had appealed to 'all others' to join their protests and programmes, leaving party flags aside

School students march in Burdwan on Wednesday demanding justice for the junior doctor raped and murdered at RG Kar Medical College and Hospital.

TT, Calcutta, 22.08.24 : The BJP’s perceived attempts to hijack the movement that has rocked Bengal in the wake of the junior doctor’s rape and murder have awakened sections within the Left to the dangers of flagless protests that the saffron camp has been encouraging.

BJP leaders such as Sukanta Majumdar and Suvendu Adhikari had appealed to “all others” to join their protests and programmes, leaving party flags aside.

Although the BJP is the biggest force in the Opposition space, the party lacks the organisational strength to spearhead a larger movement against the Mamata Banerjee dispensation. The appeal for the flagless protest is being construed as an attempt by the BJP to reach out to the Left’s support base.

Several Left leaders and workers took to social media on Wednesday, highlighting the perils of the proposed march to Nabanna by the self-styled Chhatra Samaj (student society) on August 27. Alerting people that Chhatra Samaj was a disguise for the RSS-affiliate ABVP, Left supporters were asked not to be ensnared by such calls.

“There should be a representative from every family in Bengal in that march. I will go there in my personal capacity. This is not any party’s call. Everybody knows that the buck for every problem stops with the chief minister,” said Adhikari.

“My advice to her would be to step down by August 26, so that there is no need (for cops) to open fire on the marchers on August 27,” he added.

“This is not about any party, but about ensuring justice.”

A section of CPM leaders read the “mischief” in Adhikari’s call, something he had done repeatedly during the campaign for the Assembly and Lok Sabha polls, and saw it as the Nandigram MLA’s desperate attempt to reach out to the Left cadres to increase the headcount in the BJP’s programmes, such as the march to Nabanna.

“We cannot allow our people to fall for the trap and so alerted them that the social media campaign in the name of Chhatra Samaj was the devil (ABVP) in disguise. We cannot afford to expose our core supporters to the BJP’s machinations,” said a senior CPM leader, who did not wish to be named.

“We have already lost a lot of electoral support to the BJP, we cannot now afford to lose our cadre base amid the confusion over this cause,” he added.

Reacting to Adhikari’s appeal, CPM leader Sujan Chakraborty said: “This has been an enormous people’s movement and we know how to respect it. To politically appropriate a people’s movement is not the right thing to do. If you revisit the past, both Trinamool and the BJP have appropriated people’s movements. That is why when the call to ‘Reclaim the Night’ was announced, we didn’t try to appropriate it.”

“We, our supporters, must have joined the protests but stayed at the end of the people’s movement. This is a discipline that needs to be learnt,” he added.

Several CPM leaders this newspaper spoke to felt that the perception that the Left was open to be bedfellows with the BJP on the RG Kar issue should not be allowed to take root, as the saffron camp was “communal, patriarchal, Brahmanical, and anti-women” and its hands were also stained with heinous crimes against women, such as at Hathras and Unnao in Uttar Pradesh.

Almost ringing an alarm bell, economist-activist Prasenjit Bose, while attacking the role of Mamata Banerjee in the RG Kar tragedy, warned that the movement demanding justice for women and doctors should not get hijacked by forces with “devious designs”.

“We need to be alert.… Suvendu Adhikari has given the call for a march to Nabanna on August 27. Cutting across party lines he has asked all to join the march. In the past few years, we all know what his party’s role has been in matters of rape and molestation,” said Bose.

“Since the RG Kar episode, the BJP has been spreading distorted and fake news to confuse the people. They have no real intention in fighting issues of sexual atrocities,” he added.

In fact, even Mamata had pointed fingers at the BJP and the DYFI — the youth wing of the CPM — for the vandalism on the premises of RG Kar Medical College and Hospital in the early morning of August 16.

Sujan Chakraborty rejected Mamata’s claim that the BJP and the CPM — Ram and Bam in her words — were together on the issue.

“Everyone is aware of the CPM’s role in the RG Kar issue. At the behest of the BJP and to help the RSS agenda, Mamata and her party are resorting to this campaign to malign the Left. But rest assured, they will not succeed in this,” said Chakraborty.