In the event of the Central team, that has been sent to look into the law and order situation in West Bengal, deciding to go to any particular part of the State, it will then have to go to all parts that have been affected by violence, said chairman of the Left Front Committee Biman Bose here on Tuesday.“We are strongly opposed to it visiting [certain] places. It is only if the State government agrees that the question of visiting places arises,” Mr. Bose, who is also the secretary of the West Bengal State Committee of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), said.
The Left Front feels there was no need for the Central team, which arrived here on Monday evening, to have come to the State in the first place. “It would have been better if they had not. It could have got specific information it may be seeking from the State government that always submits its reports to the Centre.”“The State government is the competent authority to submit to them [the team] details of what is happening… Why does the Central team have to go [anywhere]? Law and order is the responsibility of the State government,” Mr. Bose said.
The Centre's assurance that the visit was to “assist” the State government and entirely non-confrontational can only be accepted at “face value,” Mr. Bose said. “I know assist means help; I also know assist does not mean assess, but what is being done is to create confusion.”He was blaming the Trinamool Congress for creating the confusion and alluding to its chief Mamata Banerjee's interpretation of the visit as one “to assess” the law and order situation. “Things are being muddled up in West Bengal because of certain Opposition parties,” he said.
On the Central team's visit that comes in the wake of repeated demands by Ms. Banerjee, he observed that the Centre was silent about any violence being perpetrated by the Trinamool which “is bent on destroying democracy in the State and denying people their individual rights.”“They [the Trinamool] have described the visit as amounting to invoking Article 355, after which will come Article 356…All this is being said with the aim of confusing the people about what is true and what is false,” Mr. Bose added.
