Seeking to turn the tables on the United Progressive Alliance government, the Left parties, the Telugu Desam Party and the Janata Dal (Secular) on Thursday said it should decide on continuing alliance with the Trinamool Congress alleging its nexus with Maoists.
Claiming “incontrovertible evidence of collaboration” between the Trinamool and Maoists, leaders of these parties submitted a memorandum to Home Minister P. Chidambaram and asked the Manmohan Singh government to state how it planned to deal with the nexus.
“The responsibility of overcoming the impact of the Maoist violence is not the responsibility of the State governments alone, it is a phenomenon which spans across several States. Therefore, the Union government also has a responsibility,” the memorandum said.
Addressing journalists after the meeting, CPI(M) Polit Bureau member Sitaram Yechury reiterated that while on one hand the Prime Minister described Maoist violence as the gravest threat to India's internal security, how can the government allow the Trinamool leaders hobnob with Maoists?
Referring to the recent communication from the Home Minister to West Bengal Chief Minister, the memorandum said the six parties were constrained to draw his attention to the facts that pointed to the nexus as also media reports during the last three years “revealing the nature of the nexus.”
The parties said while earlier it was felt that the Trinamool-Maoist nexus charge was made just by the Left parties, the memorandum and annexures contained views of what leaders of Trinamool themselves had to say of this understanding.
The document also referred to a book by Trinamool MP Kabir Suman in which he gave an eyewitness account of meetings attended by Trinamool chief Mamata Banerjee and her colleague Sougata Roy with two Maoist leaders who were currently imprisoned. Discussions at these meeting revolved around possible intervention in Nandigram.
The parties also took objection to his reference to CPI (M) activists as ‘harmads' stating that it did not keep with the majesty of the Home Minister's office. The parties also said the description was not only derogatory but used by Maoists to describe hapless victims belonging to the CPI (M) activists who were eliminated through “individual assassinations and through their self appointed kangaroo courts declared in the posters left behind with the dead bodies.”
