People's Democracy

         Pradesh Congress Flirting With Separatism: Buddhadeb

  B Prasant

THE Bengal Pradesh Congress is at a dangerous game.  It has started to lean towards fuelling separatist elements in the hill areas of the Darjeeling district.  It has chosen to align itself with the separatist slogan of the GNLF and indeed has openly supported the ‘justifiability’ of the separate ‘Gorkhaland issue.’ The Bengal chief minister and CPI(M) leader, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee said this at two massive rallies held at Chopra and Karandighi in north Bengal. 

The Pradesh Congress, said Buddhadeb, “has also chosen to back the separatist Kamtapuri people’s party (KPP) and in doing this they were following in the discredited footsteps of the Trinamul Congress.”  Both the GNLF in the 1980’s and the KPP in the 1990’s and later had carried on attempts to carve out separatist states in north Bengal. Very many CPI(M) and Left Front workers had to lay down their lives while struggling for the integrity of the state and the country. 

The attempt by the Pradesh Congress to create a rift between the plainspeople and the hill people in Darjeeling was a ploy filled with ominous implications, declared the Bengal chief minister.

Elsewhere, addressing the Kolkata media at the Kolkata Press Club, Left Front chairman, Biman Basu said that the people of Bengal ‘shall never accept the ill-gotten attempt to try to carve up Bengal.’ The GNLF, it is recalled, has issued a statement of late to the effect that on winning the polls the Pradesh Congress candidate from Darjeeling would make it his prime task to raise the issue of a separate ‘Gorkhaland’ in the Lok Sabha.

Throughout the Darjeeling district meetings, padayatras, jathas, and processions as well as conventions were held in support of the CPI(M) candidate Moni Thapa, a young woman activist from the hills.  State committee member of the CPI(M), Ashok Bhattacharya said that there was no way the Congress candidate for the Darjeeling could take things for granted as far taking the seat away from the Left Front was concerned even with GNLF support. The people of the hills and the plains have already expressed their intense distaste of the conspiracy by the Congress-GNLF clique to divide them up along separatist lines. (INN)