Raising concern about the violence during the elections in West Bengal, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said here on Thursday that unlike the peaceful elections elsewhere in the country, the State presented a “different scenario”.
“After the end of each phase of polls in Bengal, we hear how many have been killed, how many have been beaten up and how many booths have been looted,” Mr. Modi said at an election meeting in the district. The violence in the polls, he said, is an indication that Trinamool Congress chairperson Mamata Banerjee has “accepted defeat”.
Mr. Modi’s remarks came on a day when sporadic violence broke out during polling in 62 Assembly constituencies, with a Communist Party of India (Marxist) supporter murdered at Domkal in Murshidabad.
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Promising an alternative political culture in the State, Mr. Modi, who addressed rallies at Howrah and Basirhat in North 24 Parganas, said the existing culture had “spoiled the State”.
At Howrah, he said the Trinamool government was creating hurdles for the east-west Metro project at Basirhaat, and raised the issue of non-cooperation in providing drinking water to the people. The BJP’s star campaigner said that people should weigh the achievements of all four major parties contesting the elections in the State.
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While Mr. Modi described the Left as “anti-industry and anti-technology”, he ridiculed the Congress by saying that after being defeated in 1977, the party had not been able to return to power in the State for four decades.
As in an earlier occasion, he targeted the Left-Congress alliance, saying that it was an “understanding not for the people but for the interest of the parties”.
“In Bengal, they are saying all good things about each other and hundreds of miles away [in Kerala], they are abusing each other,” Mr. Modi said.
During his address at Basirhaat, Mr. Modi described the Trinamool regime as a night darker than that of the Left.
“In 2011, when Didi [Ms. Banerjee] came to power, everybody hoped she will bring a new dawn, driving away the 34 years of darkness under the Left Front. But instead of a new sun, the people of Bengal were given nights darker than those under the Left,” he said.
Mr. Modi took a jibe at the Trinamool’s call for paribartan (change) during the 2011 Assembly polls. “Change has happened to no one but only in the attitude of Ms. Banerjee to corruption,” he said.
“The names which appear in the Saradha scam are the same that are seen in the Narada tapes and the same names cropped up in the Vivekananda flyover collapse,” he said.