Opposition parties raised over 1,000 allegations of malpractice and vitiation of poll atmosphere on Sunday when elections were held to 107 municipalities in Bengal.
The polling was peaceful and the state election commission said over 78 per cent of voter turnout was recorded. More than 12,000 booths were set up for the polls.
The BJP which lodged at least 927 of the complaints with the state election commission called for a 12-hour Bengal bandh from 6am on Monday in protest against the alleged malpractices. The call found moral support from the Congress state leadership and rebuke from the CPM.
The BJP wrote to the commission demanding cancellation of elections to all 108 bodies — Trinamul had already won all wards of Dinhata municipality uncontested. The party also approached governor Jagdeep Dhankhar seeking “appropriate steps” to ensure the cancellation, followed by repolls under central forces.
The Raj Bhavan summoned state election commissioner Saurabh Das on Monday. Reacting to it, Trinamul’s national working committee member Firhad Hakim advised Dhankhar to hit the streets with a BJP flag on Monday and try to see the bandh succeed.
An election commission source said director-general of police Manoj Malaviya worked in close coordination with commissioner Das to ensure peaceful voting, overseeing the deployment of around 44,000 police personnel (one to four armed police personnel for all polling premises), besides 108 WBCS officers as observers for each of the bodies, 20 IAS officers as observers for each of the districts going to the polls and 11 senior IAS officers as special observers.
At the end of the polling, Malaviya said it “(was) very peaceful… and took place beautifully”. The DGP underscored the administration’s independent and unbiased action that saw off the day without a single bullet injury or even a case of hospitalisation from grievous injury — a rarity for local body elections in the state.
Senior Trinamul leaders — such as national vice-president Partha Chatterjee, national working committee member Firhad Hakim and state general-secretary Kunal Ghosh — even in their fervent defence of the “fairness” of the polls admitted on record that there were “untoward incidents” at a few booths. All of them were quick to add that the number was a miniscule percentage of the total booth count as their figures ranged between “0.00032 per cent” and “1.2 per cent”.
Off-record, sources in the ruling party admitted that the excesses were best avoided.
“Our victory in close to 100 municipalities was all but certain, even with fully fair, free and peaceful elections. It was, yet again, the eagerness to win all of them that brought about these incidents. It has unnecessarily handed the Opposition an opportunity to raise doubts on the credibility of the mandate,” said a senior Trinamul parliamentarian.
He drew attention to at least nine instances of journalists from ABP Ananda and two other Bengali news channels getting physically attacked at places in North 24-Parganas and East Midnapore. “At least, there were no deaths.”
BJP state chief Sukanta Majumdar claimed the bandh was out of concern for “Bengal’s very future”.
Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, the Congress’s state chief (also its leader in the Lok Sabha), said the issue of the bandh was such that it ought to be supported and if his party wielded enough clout in the state, it would have called one on its own.
CPM central committee member Sujan Chakraborty was dismissive of the call for the bandh and asked why the BJP had been missing in action all day while the Left was on the streets, resisting the ruling party’s alleged malpractice on the ground.
