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| 'Primary thrust is on rural development' |
| Rajat Roy / Kolkata May 20, 2009, 00:19 IST |
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Sultan Ahmed got elected to the Lok Sabha from Uluberia by defeating CPI-M’s senior leader Hannan Mollah who had won from that seat for eight consecutive terms.Rajat Roy speaks to Sultan Ahmed about his ideas of how he would like to work for the people.
BS: Your party TMC has got a massive victory in alliance with the Congress. But this is only Lok Sabha election. Yet you are talking of getting a clear mandate from the people.
Is it not evident from the result? I know the assembly election will take place in 2011. But, the result shows that there has been a popular upsurge against the Left rule in Bengal. At the political level the alliance between TMC and Congress gave confidence to the people.
At the social level, the Muslims, scheduled castes, urban middle class, urban and rural poor-all got united to defeat the Left. Even a sizeable section of Left sympathisers also voted in our favour. For a long time, people in the rural Bengal suffered silently. They stuck to the Left out of fear. Nandigram and Singur, two iconic movements, helped them in overcoming that fear.
Today, the CPI-M politburo in a statement admitted that state specific factors are also responsible for their poor performance in West Bengal. People of the state have been saying all through about the misrule of the Left government, yet they took so much of time to admit that all is not well in the state of West Bengal. Now, people are ready to give them a final push in 2011. We can’t sit around till that time. We must work for the interest of the people in the right earnest.
BS: Your priorities now?
There are so many areas where an urgent intervention is needed. Education, employment, self-employment, empowerment, housing and rural infrastructure are the basic areas of concern. I would like to put it this way that rural development will be the thrust area. See, I got elected from Uluberia, which is a rural area. In Uluberia,, there is lack of proper roads in , in village after village the poor do not have proper housing and schools are few and far between.
Don’t forget that drop-outs among the Muslim are highest in this state. In most of the cases you will find that the nearest school is located at least five kilometers away from the Muslim dominated villages. So, one must pay attention to the development of rural infrastructure.
BS: How do you propose to go about it?
We can do a lot. We can act in conjunction with the central and state-level agencies which are responsible for all these rural development projects. We can motivate, monitor and help them in implementing various centrally funded projects.
One thing is clear, we can’t move forward by adopting a confrontational attitude towards these central and state agencies. At the same time, I would like to stress this point, I am not going to discriminate even the CPI-M controlled gram panchayat within my area. I won’t say ‘No’ to them. My point is simple, if I deprive a CPI-M led gram panchayat, ultimately it will hurt the interest of the poor people living in that area.
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