A front page government ad in the CPM mouthpiece, Ganashakti, on Wednesday with a picture of Narendra Modi stirred the B-team debate ahead of the Lok Sabha polls in Bengal as the ruling Trinamul attempted to use it as a stick to beat both its political rivals.

“Comrade, what is this? Campaigning for the BJP in return of money? For money you have sold the first page of the party daily to the BJP? Ganashakti has surrendered to the Ganashatru (Enemy of the People)?” asked Trinamul’s Kunal Ghosh, a former Rajya Sabha MP and editor of several dailies including the Trinamul mouthpiece, Jago Bangla, on his X handle.

Ghosh did not stop here.

“With the blessings of the people, under the leadership of Mamata Banerjee and led by Abhishek Banerjee, maa-mati-manush is fighting. It is proved, CPM is the B-team of the BJP, its campaigner,” Ghosh concluded.

The B-team debate has been stirring in Bengal and national politics for a long while now. In her days in the Opposition, Mamata had accused the state Congress of being the B-team of the CPM, while the Left Front was in power.

Since coming to power, she has often accused the Congress and CPM of being the B-team of the ruling BJP at the Centre, a point that Ghosh wanted to stress. Recently she had accused the Congress and the CPM of eating into the Muslim votebank that could hurt her prospects.

In Kerala, last May the Congress declared the BJP as its main rival while accusing the ruling CPM of being in collusion with the saffron party.

The advertisement, published on the day the Prime Minister was in Calcutta to inaugurate new sections of the city Metro service and address a BJP rally in Barasat, was about the flagging off and foundation stone laying ceremonies for Metro Railway projects worth Rs 15,400 crores in Calcutta, Howrah, Kochi, Pune, Agra and Ghaziabad.

This is not the first time that Ganashakti has carried an ad from the Centre or any of the Union ministries on the front page with Modi’s image. The Prime Minister’s image was splashed on the front page of the daily on May 26, 2016, on the second anniversary of the Modi government, with a list of the promises that it had fulfilled.

On January 9, 2023, the daily had on its front page an advertisement released by the Indian Railways.

The CPM general secretary Sitaram Yechury and the state secretary Mohammad Salim did not respond to calls and texts from The Telegraph Online.

The CPM’s Rajya Sabha MP and advocate Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharya dismissed Ghosh’s claim as illogical.

“This is a government ad, not one issued by the BJP. That would have been unethical. As a newspaper, Ganashakti has as much right as any other news outlet on government ads,” Bhattacharya said. “Ganashakti is a newspaper run by a trust. The party organ is People’s Democracy. Without government advertisements a newspaper cannot survive”

The Directorate of Advertising and Visual Publicity, which handles all advertisements on behalf of the Union government, is clear on the grounds where a newspaper can be suspended from being empanelled. In its rules and procedures, section f, clause 18 states: ‘It refuses to accept and carry an advertisement issued by DAVP on behalf of the Ministries/Departments of Government of India, public sector undertakings, and autonomous bodies on more than two occasions.’

In 2017, the ownership of Ganashakti was moved from the CPM to a trust.

Government ads have been a touchy issue in Bengal for several years now. During an interaction with journalists in 2021, the chief minister had encouraged the local media to write “positive news” about the state government to get more ads.

“If you were to publish more positive news about things that the government is doing, then I’ll tell the DM personally to give you more ads,” Mamata had reportedly said in an interaction with journalists. “Positive korun bigyapan nishchoi paben (If you work positively you will definitely get ads).”

Soon after it came to power in Bengal, the Mamata Banerjee government had stopped releasing ads to Ganashakti. In 2012, the newspaper had knocked the doors of the Calcutta High Court against the Trinamul government’s decision to stop releasing ads.

“The high court directed the Trinamul government that it cannot stop ads to Ganashakti. They have not issued a single ad despite the order,” said Bhattacharya.

Mamata did make it to the front page of Ganashakti, a daily linked to the CPM for close to six decades, in July 2023. A private institution had released an ad for its medical science research centre and hospital campus in Howrah’s Santragachhi.

A government order issued on March 14, 2012 by the Mamata government had directed the state-owned and state-sponsored public libraries to purchase five Bengali dailies, two Urdu and one Hindi, thus keeping out all the English newspapers as well the most read Bengali daily.

“It is felt that the newspapers/dailies, as named in the table, will, besides promoting, particularly among the rural masses, significantly contribute to the development and spread of free thinking among the members,” the circular stated.

The order was modified on March 28 2012 and two English dailies from Calcutta were included in the list.

Incidentally, Ghosh was the editor of the two Bengali dailies that were in the list, one of which went bust a year later following the Saradha scam. The Calcutta High Court had to intervene in this matter too.