Two years on, CPI-M seeks answers from Mamata

As the Trinamool Congress Monday completed two years in power in West Bengal, the CPI-M has come out with a "charge-sheet" seeking answers from Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on a host of issues including the raging chit fund scam, farmer suicides and rising crime chart.

"Two years post the change - what were the promises and what did the people of the state get? The chief minister has ordered the opposition to keep shut but the diktat cannot restrain the questions. People are seeking answers," reads an article in the party's Bengali mouth piece Ganashakti.

The article titled "charge-sheet" came out a day after Banerjee observed that two years was not enough to judge her government's performance, but claimed that the state under her, outgrew and outperformed the nation in 2012-13.

Among the foremost questions posed by the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M), is about the raging Saradha Group chit fund scam.

"The complicity of Trinamool leaders and ministers in the Saradha scam and their mutual help is no more a secret now. Didn't the CM know? Lakhs of depositors have been ruined, 20 committed suicide, why is she disagreeing to a CBI probe? Is she afraid?"

It also seeks answers on why "85 peasants and farm labourers had to commit suicide or why the workers of closed tea-gardens of North Bengal are dying of malnutrition".

From the rising crime chart including those against women, to involvement of Trinamool leaders in murders and the killing of a policeman in broad daylight, the Banerjee regime has been asked how it can assure the people about law and order when the governor himself admitted "goondagiri prevails in the state".

Citing the death of student activist Sudipto Gupta in police custody, and "six instances of police firing", the charge sheet questioned the role of the police.

"Trinamool minister Rabindranath Bhattacharya himself has accused his partymen of extortion but the government is silent. What does the symbol of integrity (Banerjee) have to say," the Marxist daily asked on the sensational revelation by the former state agriculture minister.

Enumerating a detailed list of events for which the Banerjee regime had been in the news for the wrong reasons, the CPI-M sought explanations from her.