Hours after West Bengal Governor C V Ananda Bose visited Bhangore, where supporters of two rival parties clashed a day before, leaving three dead, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Friday asserted that the panchayat poll nomination process in Bengal was as peaceful as it could be.
“There is no other state other than Bengal where the panchayat poll nomination process is so peaceful. The opposition parties — CPI(M), Congress, BJP and the ISF — are trying to blame the Trinamool Congress over one or two incidents during the nomination process,” she said, while addressing the concluding session of the two-month-long ‘Trinamool eh Nabojowar’ (New Wave in Trinamool).
The Governor on Thursday said that effective and corrective action will be taken against those responsible for the violence in the state.
“Victory in elections should depend on the count of votes, not the count of dead bodies,” he had said in a statement.
“Those who are claiming that they couldn’t file nominations due to violence, I want to tell them that over 2 lakh nominations were filed,” Banerjee was quoted by news agency ANI as saying.
Giving a break-up, the chief minister said that the TMC filed over 80,000 nominations and the remaining parties filed over 1.5 lakh nominations.
Slamming the Congress for tying up with the BJP and the CPI(M), the chief minister also said the grand old party should not expect her party, the Trinamool Congress (TMC), to back them nationally to defeat the BJP.
Raising questions on the peace situation in the state during the CPI(M) rule, she stated, “Those who are saying that there is no peace in Bengal today, I would like to ask them, how was it during the CPI(M) rule?”
The Left Front, led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist), ruled West Bengal from 1977 till 2011.
On an alliance with the Congress, the chief minister said that the Congress has had a government in several states. “They want our support in Parliament. We are ready to support them in opposing the BJP. But they should not ask TMC to support them in Bengal after tying up with CPI(M).”