West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee.
Credit: PTI Photo
Kolkata: Thirteen people were killed in police firing when hundreds of Youth Congress workers, led by Mamata Banerjee, took to the streets of Kolkata on July 21, 1993, demanding that the Election Commission stop the ruling Left Front from winning elections by rigging the poling process and make it mandatory for every voter to have a photo identity card to exercise franchise.
Thirty-two years later, Mamata Banerjee, now the chief minister of West Bengal, will on Monday again lead her Trinamool Congress – the party she launched after quitting the Congress in 1997 – in demanding free and fair elections in the state and in protesting against alleged electoral malpractices, not by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and its allies, but by the Bharatiya Janata Party.
“The faces have changed, but the oppression remains the same,” the Trinamool Congress, which came to power in 2011, ending the Left Front’s 34-year-long rule in West Bengal, posted on X on Sunday – ahead of the Martyrs’ Day rally, an annual ritual for the party to pay homage to the 13 people who were killed in police firing on the same day in 1993. The CPI(M) has now been replaced with the BJP, it wrote on the social media platform, adding: “Where the Left (Front) clung to power through scientific rigging (of the polling process), the BJP now misuses the entire electoral machinery to hijack democracy.”
The TMC has joined the Congress, Rashtriya Janata Dal and other parties in the I.N.D.I.A. in opposing the EC’s Special Intensive Review of the electoral rolls in Bihar amid speculation that the poll panel might carry out a similar exercise even in West Bengal.
Bihar is scheduled to go to the polls later this year, while the assembly elections in West Bengal are expected to take place in April-May next year.
Mamata, the TMC supremo, recently alleged that after winning the 2024 assembly elections in Maharashtra and Delhi by manipulating the electoral rolls, the BJP was planning to do the same in Bihar and West Bengal. She vowed to fight the saffron party’s conspiracy in West Bengal “inch by inch”.
“Let them (the BJP) not forget this is (West) Bengal,” the TMC stated on X on Sunday. “This is the land where 13 lives were sacrificed on this very day in 1993 for the right to vote. If anyone dares to trample on our democratic rights or insult the dignity of our people, they’ll be met with a wall of resistance.”
Suvendu Adhikari, the state BJP heavyweight and the Leader of the Opposition in the state assembly, already demanded that the EC should conduct a house-to-house survey to strike out the Rohingyas from the electoral rolls in West Bengal. The TMC alleged that the BJP had hatched a conspiracy to strike out the genuine voters from the electoral rolls in West Bengal.
The mega rally on Monday is also likely to see Mamata and her party stepping up attacks on the BJP governments in Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Odisha, and Delhi for harassing the Bangla-speaking migrant workers from West Bengal. The TMC is trying to cash in on the issue to counter the saffron party’s aggressive Hindutva.
Thousands of TMC workers and supporters from across the state have already started arriving in Kolkata for the Martyrs’ Day rally, which would be the last before the next assembly elections.