Governor M.K. Narayanan said here on Friday that the Communist Party of India (Marxist) was entitled to voice complaints, but could not resort to using rods against Ministers. In response to Mr. Narayanan’s remarks on Wednesday that the attack on West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and her Cabinet Ministers in New Delhi was “ pre mediated” and “serious enough to warrant a public apology” from the CPI(M) Politburo”, party general secretary Prakash Karat had sought on Thursday the intervention of President Pranab Mukherjee in the matter.
“They are entitled to complain….. not to the kind of rods they have used,” Mr. Narayanan said, when asked by journalists to comment on Mr. Karat’s letter to the President saying that it was for him to decide whether “such political interventions by the Governor are justified….”
Reacting to remarks made by the Governor, State secretary of the CPI(M) Biman Bose had also said that “he [the Governor] might be knowing how the police operate.. but does not know how the Politburo or the CPI(M) committees operate”.
This had led to Mr. Narayanan issuing a fresh statement on Thursday that he had been a student of Communism for over six decades and suggestion to issue a public apology by the Politburo was as per the principles of “ democratic centralism.”
Addressing students at Presidency University during the day, the Governor referred to the attack on Chief Minister and other Ministers in New Delhi on Tuesday and said the political party “responsible for the incident says that they are not involved.”
Mr. Narayanan said there was usually an attempt “not to acknowledge one’s guilt” and added that “unwillingness to acknowledge truth is [one of the] major fault-lines” of our polity.
He said that while tremendous progress had been made in the spheres of science and technology, politics in the country has become “much coarser” over the years.
Senior leaders of the parties in the Left Front, including Mr. Bose, who is also its chairperson, sought the immediate intervention of the State administration in clamping down on the violence unleashed by Trinamool activists across the State following the incident in New Delhi.
In a letter to the State’s Home Secretary, the Left leaders said hundreds of offices of the Left parties and Left mass organisations had been ransacked and, in some instances, former Ministers of the Left Front were also attacked. There was an urgent need to check the violence, it said.
