Slamming the Trinamool Congress for its attempts at creating anarchy and obstructing development, West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee cautioned its leadership on Sunday against thinking that it could wrest control of power in the State on the strength of some seats won in the 2009 Lok Sabha election.
“It is not so easy to come to power. What does it (the Trinamool Congress) think? That it will take control and I will sit back and doze?” he asked at a rally organised by the district committee of the Left Front at Dhulagarh in Howrah district, ahead of the Assembly election.
Accusing the Trinamool Congress of joining hands with various forces across the State, including the Maoists, in its moves to stir up trouble, Mr. Bhattacharjee brought out in the open his disapproval of the use of the word “harmad” (hired armed goons) by Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram in a recent letter to him on the situation in those areas of the State where security operations were on against the Left wing extremists.
The Chief Minister expressed “surprise” over the “sudden” letter from Mr. Chidambaram and the term “harmad” being used by an “educated” person resorting to the “uncivil” language ‘made popular' by the Trinamool.
“There are those [CPI(M) workers] who are being killed [by the Maoists] and being described as ‘harmad'….Neither has he responded to the charge of the Trinamool Congress joining hands with the Maoists….This is how the Centre views the situation but the people (of the State) are only too well aware of what is actually happening,” Mr. Bhattacharjee said.
He warned against moves of the Trinamool of “taking by the hand” the Maoists to different parts of the State in keeping with its agenda of creating trouble and disrupting any sort of development work. “We need to be alert. This needs to be resisted,” he asserted.
The Chief Minister also came down strongly on the Congress, “a party of the traders” for failing to regulate the prices of essential commodities which continued to spiral and equated its policies with the Trinamool Congress which was taking the place of the former in West Bengal “as the party of the rich.”
Railway Minister Mamata Banerjee was also responsible for the price rise because of her decision to hike freight rates, he added.
While appealing to the poor and the youth not to be “misled” by the “lies and false promises” of the Trinamool leadership, he also cautioned Left workers against their wrongdoings for which a section of the people had sided with the former “not out of love but out of anger [against the Left].”
As for the errant in the Communist Party of India (Marxist), he warned: “Either you correct your wrong ways or we will expel you from the party.”
Mr. Bhattacharjee later visited the house of Swapan Kolay, a member of the Students' Federation of India who was killed, allegedly by supporters of the students' wing of the Trinamool, in violence related to college elections in Andul last month.
