People's Democracy

     A Vote For Trinamul Is A Vote For

Sangh Parivar: Buddhadeb

B Prasant

ONE vote in the ballot box in favour of the Trinamul Congress would be one vote in favour of the Sangh Parivar. The task before the people is to send more Left MP’s to the Parliament to ensure that the opposition against the BJP and its lackeys gets that much stronger. Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, Polit Bureau member of the CPI(M) and the Bengal chief minister, said this while addressing two big rallies, one at Chinsurah in Hooghly district, and the other in north Kolkata. Both rallies had overflowing gatherings that spread even in the areas and locales adjoining the main venues.

Buddhadeb said that the first phases of the election process clearly showed how the BJP and the NDA were fast losing ground. The desperation that was apparent in the aggressive speeches of a communal character being sprouted by the top BJP leadership was a sign that the BJP was not quite shining and feeling good, was how Buddhadeb put it.

In the event of the NDA government returning to office by whatever means available to persons of their ilk, a disaster would overtake the country as the secular edifice would come under a virulent, planned, and vicious attack, he said. The multi-religious milieu would get shattered. Should the people even think of allowing what happened in Gujarat to be spread all over the land? Vajpayee’s saying that "the Sangh is my soul" was a signal that the RSS agenda of creating what they call a ‘Hindu Rashtra’ was not only on the cards but has come to the fore, Buddhadeb said.

He reminded the gatherings that the RSS ideologues and pracharaks were engaged for quite some time now in organising a villainous campaign of a strictly communal nature. The answer of the people to all this would be to vote the BJP out of office.

Buddhadeb noted that the Trinamul Congress was not only an NDA partner but was responsible solely for providing BJP with some amount of political base in Bengal which earlier had been free from the tentacles of this communal outfit. The successors of the Gandhi killer Nathuram Godse and the of the brigade that pulled down the Babri Masjid are in place today (however marginal) because of Mamata Banerjee and her desperadoes, and this the people of Bengal, democratically conscious and secular, must not forget. Thus, voting for Trinamul Congress would mean nothing less than voting directly for the BJP and the Sangh Parivar, warned Buddhadeb.

The Bengal chief minister said that the Lucknow incident where 25 women and children were trodden underfoot to death in the mêlée that happened when the BJP leadership grandly announced that saris would be distributed was a sign of the malady the entire country was suffering from. The public distribution system has been killed off. Food is becoming costlier and scarcer day-by-day while wheat was being exported to countries like the US as animal feed and at dirt-cheap prices, prices much lower than that the people here have to shell out. Famine-like conditions are allowed to prevail over large stretches of the land. Factories and production units are in a planned manner being closed down. In Bengal, 27 such centrally run production units have been closed down. Millions of workers all over the country have lost their jobs. Such core sectors as bank, insurance, and oilfields are being rampantly privatised. The proverbial Damocles’ Sword hangs over the central government employees as the VRS looms on the horizon like a spectre. Is this a time when people can feel good, queried Buddhadeb?

Attacking the Congress as the progenitor of the so-called ‘economic modernisation’ drive back in the 1990s, Buddhadeb said that the Sinhas and the Singhs were following in the footsteps of Manmohans and Chidambarams and in a more resolute fashion. "We," said Buddhadeb, "have in Bengal, thrown out the Congress from office." The fight in Bengal in both against the BJP and the Congress, declared Buddhadeb.

Buddhadeb also touched upon the undoubted success of the Bengal Left Front government in areas like democratisation, decentralisation, and economic progress, despite having to operate within the constraints set upon it by the non-cooperative BJP government.

Aloke Majumdar presided over the Kolkata meeting while Binod Das presided over the Chinsurah meeting. The Left Front leaders as well as the local candidates addressed both meetings.