Mamata Banerjee in a press meet, has termed the BJP (Bhartiya Janata Party) as a militant organisation. She accused of BJP of dividing people along religious lines and dared it to attack her party, the Trinamool Congress. Ms Banerjee also alleged that the BJP is manipulating Electronic Voting Machines or EVMs to increase its vote share in the state and urged her party workers to prepare for the next Lok Sabha poll as the entire country is looking forward to it. “We are not a militant organisation like the BJP. They are arrogant and intolerant. They are religiously biased. They don’t like Muslims, Christians, Sikhs – they are even differentiating between the upper caste and the lower caste Hindus,” she said at the extended core committee meeting of the Trinamool Congress. This statement of hers came as a reply to BJP’s Dilip Ghoser
Hitting out at the BJP, she said, “They are threatening to carry out encounters. Just because they are in power in Delhi, they are talking about hurling bombs. I dare them to come and touch us. We will show them their place.” Ms Banerjee accused the BJP, the Congress, the CPI(M) and the Maoists of joining hands against the Trinamool in Bengal and alleged that the BJP is manipulating EVMs to increase its vote share in the state.
However, Mamata’s call for terming the BJP is ironic, because the West Bengal has been the bastion of violence for a long time. Mamata has let her TMC workers run amok in the state. West Bengal recently oversaw two of the most gruesome political murders. An 18-year-old boy was killed for “being a BJP worker” in Purulia, a chilling “explainer” scribbled on his T-shirt. Barely four days later, was another BJP man’s body found hanging from an electricty pole in the same district. The police dismissed the death as ‘suicide’. Mamata Banerjee who has now adorned the avatar of being ‘liberal and secular’ maintained a stoic silence on both these murders. However, Derek O Brien, TMC’s senior politician and politician indulged in the usual bout of whataboutery and virtue-signalling. He tweeted, “https://twitter.com/derekobrienmp/status/995911770052050944?
This didn’t stop here. During the recent Panchayat elections, a poll official was found dead on train tracks near Raiganj station.
But there has been remarkably little introspection by the party — or the liberals who are its usual supporters — over such crimes. While there had been vocal, and justified, outrage over the Ram Navami violence in Bengal, the same intensity is missing in any criticism or candle marches this time.
Her government could not even ensure a routine administrative procedure like the peaceful conduct of an election campaign during the Lok Panchayat polls. The ruling of the Calcutta High Court dealt a big blow to the TMC. The judicial verdict indicated, that the government has been either unable or unwilling to act against the Trinamool Congress cadres who have been accused by the opposition parties of preventing them from filing the nomination papers. By allowing the situation to deteriorate to such a level, Mamata Banerjee has done a disservice to her professed mission of leading the charge against the Narendra Modi government. Instead the age-old gundagiri of the Trinamool Party has come to the fore. The BJP themselves seemed to take advantage of Mamata’s pro-Muslim stand and decided to play their unabashed Hindutva hooliganism out on the streets. What Bengal became was a playground of two hooligan parties flexing their muscle strength out on the streets.
What the BJP’s opponents will have to remember is that one reason why the saffron outfit is believed to be losing ground in northern and western India is the lawlessness of some of its followers like the gau rakshaks or those who target courting couples belonging to different religions or threaten to chop noses of filmmakers and actresses whose artistic works they do not like. The country’s youth is on its way of rejecting extremism and violence of any kind.