A meeting of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Home Affairs saw the Trinamool Congress and the BJP blaming each other for the political violence in West Bengal.
The committee headed by senior Congress leader Anand Sharma was deliberating on the subject of “atrocities and crimes against women and children”'. Haryana and West Bengal officials made a presentation on the subject.
According to sources, TMC Lok Sabha member Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar started the argument. “Without naming the BJP, she said that the youth wing of a certain party in West Bengal has been targeting women in the State, especially the TMC workers. They threaten the women workers with rape,” a member said.
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At this, the few BJP members who were present hit back, accusing the TMC of carrying out political violence in the State. BJP members claimed that many of their party workers have been killed during the last many months in the run-up to the coming Assembly elections in the State.
The Left parties too had made a similar charge against the TMC.
The BJP is emerging as a key challenger to the two-term TMC government.
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Sharma’s intervention
The heated argument went on for several minutes, till Mr. Sharma intervened, asking the members not to go into the specifics and stick to the agenda.
West Bengal DGP and Chief Secretary were present at the meeting. In their presentation, West Bengal claimed that the number of cases of crime against women have reported a sharp decline. They credited the State government’s schemes like ‘Kanyashree’ (which incentivises families to keep their daughters in school and not to marry them off before the legal age of 18) for the drop in the number of cases.
Not convinced, the BJP members, the sources, said asked the DGP to explain why the State continued to be the nerve centre of human trafficking. The officials have told the committee that they would answer the questions in a few days.
This was the sixth meeting of the committee on the subject.