BJP delegation goes to President seeking intervention in West Bengal

Alleging constitutional breakdown in West Bengal under the Trinamool Congress rule, a BJP delegation on Tuesday met President Ram Nath Kovind and sought his intervention in the matter.

Senior BJP leader Mukul Roy said over 89 persons with links to his party have been killed in the state since panchayat elections were held there in 2018 and over 35 of them have been murdered after the announcement of Lok Sabha election results in May this year.

Roy told PTI that the Mamata Banerjee-led government was foisting "false cases", most of them under the charge of possessing narcotics, on BJP workers and claimed that over 20,000 people were jailed.

"West Bengal suffers from anarchism and the law and order situation is very alarming. There is a constitutional breakdown in the state. We sought the intervention of the President," he said.

Earlier, BJP general secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya said his party also took the matter of the murder of three members of a family to the President. The state police, however, asserted that it had solved the case with the arrest of a mason who knew the family.

The delegation which met Kovind included Union minister Debasree Chaudhuri and MPs S S Ahluwalia, Swapan Dasgupta, Raju Bista and Arjun Singh besides Roy and Vijayvargiya.

With some Hindutva activists alleging a communal angle in the incident, the murder had heated up the state's political temperature.