Alleging that the Communist Party of India (Marxist) was perpetrating atrocities on people in the Jangal Mahal area with the help of local authorities, Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee on Friday said those arrested on false charges of being left-wing extremists would be released after her party came to power in West Bengal.
Addressing an election rally at Jhargram in Paschim Medinipur district, parts of which have been affected by Maoist violence, she charged the Left Front government with “bringing Maoists” into the region.
Ms. Banerjee, who has been rubbishing the Left charges that her party has links with Maoists, defended the Trinamool decision to support those “who had suffered police excesses, which led to a movement (subsequently taken over by the Maoist-backed Police Santrash Birodhi Janasadharaner Committee),” in the wake of the landmine explosion during Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee's return from Salbani in November 2008.
The Chief Minister “is scared of confronting the people in both Jangal Mahal and the hills [of Darjeeling],” Ms. Banerjee alleged.
At another rally at Nayagram, she claimed: “I will solve the problems of Jangal Mahal and the hills after I win the elections.”
Exhorting the people “to put the final nail in the coffin of the CPI(M) in the sixth and last phase of the Assembly elections (to be held in the Jangal Mahal area on May 10), she said the region would be free of “terror” and “all atrocities will come to an end” once her party came to power. Ms. Banerjee accused the Left Front also of diverting Central funds into its own coffers even as she claimed that in 82 blocks (out of the 341 in the State) “people cannot have even one proper meal a day.”
