Didi blames EC of scuttling her Assembly poll campaign
West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee, on Saturday, blamed the Election Commission (EC) of scuttling her Assembly poll campaign, at the behest of the BJP, by curtailing the daily campaign time from 7.00 pm to 10.00 am and extending the silence period from 48 hours to 72 hours for the remaining three phases in the wake of a massive spike in Covid-19 cases in its fresh wave in the state.
The TMC supremo told the EC at a party rally in Galsi of Burdwan East, “You are working according to the wishes of the BJP. If anything big happens, you will be responsible. Already two candidates have died at two seats in Murshidabad where we won earlier. Though they belonged to two different parties, I feel sad for them because I do not want any death.”
“You deliberately curtailed the campaign period, at a time when Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union home minister Amit Shah did not have their rallies, to stop me,” she added.
Tearing into the Central poll panel, she also claimed, “As the remaining phases include urban areas like Kolkata, we will not be able to campaign because the door-to-door campaign is held in the day time while rallies are held in the evening there.”
Ms Banerjee alleged,
“We wanted the remaining poll phases to be clubbed so that people do not get infected. But it was not done. Instead, the time for campaign has been curtailed. Why? When the areas under the control of BJP—though they will not win there this time—went to polls, eight-to-ten days were given to them. But now the silence period has also been increased in all the remaining phases. We lost four days of our campaign in total.”