Prior to polls, Trinamool gets 33% of Hooghly
GREEN TERROR Ruling party accused of not allowing rivals to file nomination
The panchayat polls in West Bengal are taking the appearance of a field day for the Trinamool, the ruling party in the state.
The party already has in its pocket 38% of the gram panchayat seats and 35% of panchayat samiti seats in Hooghly district, which goes to polls on Monday. Many of those who managed to file nominations could not campaign or even find a polling agent.
A voter in the panchayat (or rural) polls casts his (or her) vote for a candidate each at three levels — gram panchayat, panchayat samiti and zilla parishad. A cluster of gram panchayats forms the panchayat samiti, and correspondingly a group of the latter forms the zilla parishad.
In the Arambag subdivision (in Hooghly), the Trinamool has won 730 of the 924 gram panchayats and 134 of the 185 panchayat samitis uncontested.
“Red terror (referring to the left) has been replaced by green terror (referring to the Trinamool). Nothing else has changed in West Bengal,” West Bengal Pradesh Congress Committee president Pradip Bhattacharya said.
CPI(M) Hooghly district secretary and former higher education minister Sudarshan Roychoudhury said: “It’s more a farce than polls. In large swathes of Hooghly district, the Trinamool simply did not allow anyone to file nominations.”
However, in Singur, which saw the rise of the Trinamool through party chief Mamata Banerjee’s fight for the people whose land had been acquired for a Tata owned car plant, the party will have to contest in all the seats.