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| Left trains gun on Mamata in West Bengal |
| BS Reporter / Kolkata May 11, 2009, 01:03 IST |
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If one goes by the tone of campaign by the ruling Left Front in West Bengal, it would leave no one in doubt that its guns are trained on one single woman: Mamata Banerjee, the leader of the state’s main Opposition Trinamool Congress.
CPI(M) general secretary Prakash Karat, politburo members Sitaram Yechury and Brinda Karat, Chief Minister Buddhadev Bhattacharya, the party’s state-level secretary Biman Bose, and many other leaders have been campaigning in the Kolkata South Lok Sabha constituency, where Banerjee is holding the fort.
The party has lined up its massive organisational strength in that constituency its high-pitched campaigns suggests that it is not leaving any stone unturned to make the fight as close as possible. Against the high-profile Mamata in Kolkata South, the CPI(M) candidate is a relatively low-profile person — Rabin Deb.
However, he enjoys the confidence of the party leadership and is getting full support of the party machinery. As a CPI(M) insider puts it, the party’s strategy is to keep Banerjee engaged as much as possible in her constituency and sweat for every single vote there.
The party’s senior leaders have joined the campaign and started gunning for her. While Karat appealed to the voters of the Kolkata South constituency yesterday not to vote in favour of Banerjee as she might be going back to the NDA alliance soon, the TC chief today made it clear that she won’t be a part of the NDA after the polls. “I am not going with either BJP or NDA,” she said.
On the last Sunday before the final round of polls, Buddhadev Bhattacharya and Manik Sarkar — chief ministers of Left-ruled West Bengal and Tripura — were busy campaigning in Kolkata South. Bhattacharya even tried to highlight the issue of Tata Motors’ pullout of its Nano car project from Singur, claiming that the world’s cheapest car would be manufactured in Singur in future.
Biman Bose, the CPI(M)’s state-level secretary, accused Banerjee of not having any serious interest in attending the Parliament session. Citing records from the Lok Sabha secretariat, Bose said that in the last five years Banerjee attended a mere 56 out of around 400 days of Parliament session.
The Trinamool chief replied by saying that all these days she was busy fighting the Left government and ruling CPI(M) in Singur and Nandigram. On the question of the Nano project she tried to clear any apprehension about her attitude towards industrialisation.
“I am not against industry. I am only interested to see that both agriculture and industry should be allowed to flourish simultaneously. One should not grow at the cost of other,” she said.
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