The wheels of political speculation have started spinning full throttle yet again inside the ruling Trinamool Congress in West Bengal after the party’s youth leader and spokesperson Debangshu Bhattacharya’s Facebook post on Thursday evening, which advocated the deployment of central paramilitary forces for Saturday’s civic polls, was perceived to be out of sync with the party’s official position.
Debangshu, who coined the Khela Hobe slogan for the party ahead of the 2021 state elections and has close to 2,500 followers on the social interactive site, made a strong case for deployment of central forces in the Bidhannagar municipal polls and double their deployment compared to the state elections, if necessary. He also demanded that “police should be given 100 per cent free hand” in maintaining law and order to ensure free and fair polls on Saturday.
That the post was put up on a day Trinamool was declared unopposed winners in the Sainthia, Budge Budge, Dinhata and Suri municipalities during the nomination stage itself, elections to which are scheduled on February 27, added significance.
While the TMC and the Bengal government have consistently opposed the deployment of central forces in all elections held in the state in the recent past, the Calcutta High Court on Thursday, in response to a petition, left the matter to be decided by the State Election Commission and directed the body to finalise deployment by consulting the state government within 12 hours of the passing of the order.
Although the commission has refrained from officially stating its position after that meeting, sources told News18 that the law and order responsibility would be handled by the Bidhannagar police commissionerate under the supervision of an IG-ranked officer.
Various complaints of violence, intimidation and electoral malpractices were lodged against the ruling party by opposition forces in the recently concluded Kolkata municipal polls where the Trinamool Congress registered a landslide victory by winning 134 out of the 144 wards.
In his post, Bhattacharya stated that “a repeat of 2018” (purportedly referring to the panchayat poll experience in Bengal where allegations of rampant use of ruling party coercion were made by opposition parties across the board and where the TMC won a third of the seats unopposed) “would lead to another 2019” (presumably referring to the voters’ backlash a year later which led to the BJP making significant inroads in the state in Lok Sabha polls where it won 18 of the 42 seats) which, he stated, “would only be a matter of time”.
He went on to add that “2021” (TMC’s decisive victory in state polls last year) “may not get repeated every time”.
Significantly, Bhattacharya also joined the bandwagon of a section of youth leaders in the party who changed their social media cover photos on Thursday evening and put up the ‘I Support #OnePersonOnePost in AITC’ poster.
That move was contested as “not the official party position” by Kolkata mayor Firhad Hakim on Friday. Hakim, who is also a minister in Mamata Banerjee’s cabinet, is among the exceptions to this policy which was advocated by the party after the 2021 state elections.
The fracture, now apparent on the surface and in public domain, seems to have rattled party supremo Mamata Banerjee herself who has called an urgent meeting of Trinamool leaders at her Kalighat residence on Saturday, reportedly to address the issue and stop this trend of divergence from spiralling out of control.
What began with the party’s all India general secretary Abhishek Banerjee advocating the deferring of civic polls amid the rapidly worsening Covid situation in the state which was publicly countered by senior party leader Kalyan Banerjee and the recent embarrassment of multiple candidate lists and widespread public show of dissent over the distribution of tickets for the civic elections seems to now have boiled down to a battle of generations which Mamata Banerjee is finding difficult to contain.
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