People's Democracy

Anil Biswas Condemns Attack on Sikdar

BJP union minister, Tapan Sikdar provoked an unsightly incident at the Kaipur village at Barasat in north 24 Parganas on May 5. Caught making an ugly and slanderous attack on the CPI(M) leadership during what was purported to be an election speech, Sikdar’s car was stoned and Sikdar himself received a few minor cuts from shards of broken glass.  Earlier, the coterie of ‘strong men’ who accompanied Sikdar had torn down banners and festoons of the CPI(M) and had roughed up CPI(M) workers who had protested the act.  Two CPI(M) workers received serious injuries and had to be hospitalised.

This episode was quickly made up into a story in a section of the corporate media that Sikdar was ‘mortally injured,’ and true to form, the Trinamul Congress leader, Mamata Banerjee was quick to join the cause to forget for the moment the bitter slanging match she regularly indulges in with Sikdar.  She immediately claimed, and for the umpteenth time: “conditions in Bengal were fit for the promulgation of Art 356 of the Indian Constitution leading to an immediate dismissal of the Left Front government.”

Reacting to the incident, state secretary of the CPI(M), Anil Biswas condemned the attack but said that provocation had existed and he stressed that the union minister himself was never the target of the attack on the vehicle in which the BJP ‘strong men’, too, were travelling.  Surprisingly enough, neither Sikdar nor the Bengal BJP unit has lodged any complaint in this regard with the state election commission.

Biswas said that as the Panchayat polls would draw nearer, such incidents of provocation might well go up.  He called upon all workers and sympathisers, and supporters of the CPI(M) not to get provoked in any manner.