The CPM has decided to set up a dedicated team of leaders that will monitor the activities of the RSS and similar Hindu groups in Bengal and design strategies to counter them.

The Hindutva Watch Group was announced by CPM state secretary Md Salim during his concluding remarks at the party's two-day state committee meeting that ended here on Wednesday.

“Our central committee had decided that we will set up such bodies at the national level as well as in all states. In Bengal, several individuals were doing this work in their own capacities. Now, we will do it as an institution,” Salim told this newspaper on Thursday.

Sources said the Hindutva Watch Group would be composed of CPM leaders like Kalatan Dasgupta, Madhuja Sen Roy, Somnath Bhattacharya and Satyajit Banerjee, who are part of the party's younger generation.

Sources in the RSS said the Sangh had expanded rapidly in Bengal in the last decade. In March this year, the organisation conducted 1,664 daily meetings or sakhas across Bengal. A year ago, it used to organise 1,549 Sakhas.

The CPM has been blaming chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s way of politics for the growth of the Sangh parivar in Bengal, since her ascent to power in 2011.

The sources claimed that when Mamata had taken over the reins of the state in 2011, the RSS had around 700 sakhas in Bengal.

“The RSS and its affiliates are evolving their ways of spreading hatred and facilitating communal violence. That will be countered politically, and culturally by our team,” Salim said.

A dedicated network within the CPM with access to the grassroots will work for the group. Their job will be to identify the exercises undertaken by the Hindutva groups across the state and report them to the team, which will then draw a counter plan of action.

The action to counterthe RSS propaganda will consist of political or socio-cultural programmes depending on the situation and the place of occurrence, a CPM leader said.

For instance, one of the immediate responsibilities of this team will be to counter the saffron propaganda ahead of rural polls.

BJP leaders have publicly spoken in favour of the unity of all anti-Trinamul forces in the panchayat polls. Suvendu Adhikari, BJP MLA and the leader of the Opposition, and Sukanta Majumdar, the state BJP chief, have said on multiple occasions that uprooting Trinamul is the primary target and there has to be a “people’s alliance” to accomplish this task.

But the CPM believes the saffron camp is trying to use the recent attempts at Left revival to its own benefit, which has prompted them to call for a tacit understanding at the grassroots.

“The BJP is still organisationally weak in Bengal.... They want to use us to divide the Muslim votes, which might help them to wrest the polls,” a CPM source said.

“The Hindutva Watch Group will be countering this narrative and come up with ideas on how to illuminate the people that there isn’t any and can never be an alliance between the Left forces and the BJP,” the source added.

In his address, while Salim spoke in favour of an alliance with the Congress, and other democratic, secular and Left forces, he repeatedly instructed that there must not be any form of political understanding with the BJP ahead of the panchayat polls.

He also said that the party would declare the names of its candidates for the three-tier of panchayat as soon as the polls were announced. A senior CPM leader said that this decision was to remove any possible confusion in the minds of the voters.