NDA TEAM’S VISIT

Sprouting The Usual Dirge Of Untruth

B Prasant

THE visit of the NDA team, comprising a few little-known, second-rung ‘leaders,’ was principally a gesture of mollification of the deep mental agony of the Trinamul Congress chief, Ms Mamata Banerjee, who has remained virtually under a self-imposed exile, occasionally throwing tantrums that are typical of the siege mentality that appears to have gripped the Trinamul Congress as such.

Earlier, Ms Mamata Banerjee has been on the receiving end of a rhetorical slap on the face when the deputy prime minister L K Advani had refused to oblige her wishes of attending a Trinamul Congress-run programme of a kind. That Advani had chosen to share the dais with Mamata’s bete noir in the state BJP, Tapan Sikdar, must have proved additionally galling to her.

Thus when, shall we say, the ‘junior’ NDA team came over, it was with a marked coolness of appearance that the Trinamul Congress leader, harried as she constantly is by the running quarrels between the groups supporting her and opposing her in the Kolkata corporation, met the delegation from Delhi.

Hardly had she managed to get a word in when the BJP’s state chief, Tathagata Roy (who is constantly talking of having to “take a view of the BJP-Trinamul Congress relationship”) whisked the NDA team away for what he described as an on-the-spot experience of the terror that existed in Bengal.

The NDA team visited a few villages in Midnapore district and when a handful of the rural folk could be ‘persuaded’ to speak to the team, the subject matter of the complaints principally involved issues related to the dissatisfaction of the upper crust of the villagers with the re-distributive land reforms of the Left Front government. That the act of translation turned the complaints into vociferous appeals to the NDA to “save from CPI(M) misrule” is, of course, an entirely different matter.

Later, speaking to the media, the NDA team, flanked by Tathagata Roy who was ready with a ‘background paper,” repeated the old lies about “state-sponsored terrorism” in Bengal and the inability of “20 thousand Trinamul Congress-BJP candidates for the rural polls to file their nominations,” charges that have been proved to be blatant falsehoods long ago.

Commenting on the visit, Left Front chairman Biman Basu said the untruths that emanated out of the NDA team’s visit marked yet another attempt by the Trinamul Congress-BJP combine to try to confuse the people. The people have rejected the BJP-Trinamul Congress combination during the rural polls and the municipal elections, and they would discard the latest attempt at blackguarding the Left Front and the Left Front government.

Later, Biman Basu left for attending a programme commemorating the martyr Bhagat Singh in Vancouver in Canada. He would also attend, on behalf of the Vidyasagar Foundation, the World Bengali Festival in Los Angeles in the United States. State CPI(M) secretary Anil Biswas and Robin Deb, chief whip of the Left Front in Bengal assembly, were present at the Kolkata Airport to see Basu off.