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BJP, Congress out to divide country: Buddhadeb

Special Correspondent

KOLKATA: The Bharatiya Janata Party and the Congress are out to divide the country albeit in different ways, West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee cautioned at an election rally at Mahishadal in Purbo Medinipur district on Sunday.

While the BJP “is dangerous” and wants “not to keep the country united but to set up a ‘Hindu rashtra,’ the Congress is creating “divisions” on economic lines by making “billionaires out of a few and pushing the vast majority into poverty,” he said.

Panchayat elections are to be held in the district on May 11 and the run-up to the polls there has generated intense political interest for it is in this district that Nandigram is located.

The Left parties had supported the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (from the outside) “not out of love for the Congress” but to keep the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance from coming power. “Don’t we know what the Congress stands for?”

“The situation in the country is not good at all. Suicides by farmers that have claimed 16,000 lives over the past three years in the Vidharba in Maharashtra, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, continue to be committed…And here is a Centre seeking alms from the United States of America,” he said.

“We know what the Congress is capable of; we’ve known so since 1947,” he said. “‘Keep sleeping; the people do not want you’,” he advised the party.

Ridiculing the attempts at forging a “mahajot” (grand alliance) of Opposition parties in the State — a disparate anti-Left combine that include the “BJP, the Congress, the Trinamool Congress, the Socialist Unity Centre of India and the naxalites” — Mr. Bhattacharjee wondered what such an alliance “that is without any principle” could stand for.

“The job of the Trinamool Congress is to say ‘no’ to all development,” the Chief Minister said while recalling the months of strife through 2007 in neighbouring Nandigram “when houses were set on fire, roads dug up, culverts damaged and people killed.”

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