Mamata Banerjee’s INDIA partners from Bengal, the Congress and the CPM, attacked the chief minister and Narendra Modi with equal intensity on Monday, accusing them of competitive polarisation with the aim of rich harvests of political dividends in the general election season.

On the same day, an “anti-fascist” conference of Left outfits — which are not aligned with the CPM-led Front — and Mamata’s Trinamul Congress tore into Prime Minister Modi and the saffron ecosystem for allegedly trying to monopolise Hinduism with the Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan vision of the Sangh parivar and using communal polarisation to divide, to serve its political purpose. Several social activists also took part in the conference.

The Bengal unit of the Congress asserted that it had nothing against Ram or the temple in Ayodhya, but was against turning the deity into a “political product” for the sake of elections.

“We all respect Ram. But the BJP’s marketing of Ram… even upstaging the god for the sake of Narendra Modi’s publicity is most unfortunate. This is event management for the sake of winning elections, not much else,” said the Congress’s chief spokesperson for Bengal, Soumya Aich Roy.

“The way they went about it, disregarding the legit concerns raised by the Shankaracharyas, cannot be condoned,” he added in an apparent reference to the criticism from three of four Sankaracharyas because the consecration of an unfinished temple flouts the scriptures and the resultant controversy.

He was equally unsparing of the Trinamul chief.

“Likewise, Trinamul had to select this specific day, none other, for its so-called integration events. The real pro-people issues, the corruption, the governance failure, the unemployment, the state of the economy, those are being relegated to the sidelines by both her here and him there,” said Aich Roy, whose party is in a precarious situation with regard to the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance in Bengal.

The Congress, Trinamul and the CPM are constituents of the INDIA bloc. In Bengal, the Congress and the CPM have been at daggers drawn with Trinamul. In her Park Circus Maidan address in the evening, Mamata was belligerent in her references to both the CPM and the Congress.

“They (Mamata and Modi) are both trying to use the armour and shield of religion to get through electoral battles, shoving the genuine concerns under the carpet. They are both adhering to the RSS script,” added Aich Roy. “This won’t succeed in the court of the people.”

CPM state secretary Md. Salim said Mamata was no different from Modi.

“Bearing the footwear of the RSS here, Mamata Banerjee is pretty much running the same form of governance and politics here. She, too, is trying to make the real issues take the backseat by bringing to centre stage temples, mosques, gurdwaras and churches. Why?” he asked at a press conference.

“All key parameters with regard to the economy, poverty, hunger, civil liberties, press freedom, India doing abysmally. They are both trying to make January 22 bigger than January 23,” added Salim, referring to the nation’s one of the greatest icons, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, whose birth anniversary is on January 23.

In the “anti-fascist” conference, which followed a rally between Wellington Square and the Netaji Indoor Stadium, 200-odd mass organisations adhering to Trinamul and the wider Left — such as CPI-ML (Liberation) — and human rights defenders like Teesta Setalvad and Harsh Mander participated. Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen was invited to join, but he was unable to on account of ill-health.

“The situation is very peculiar. What the government should do is done by the corporate world and the government is doing something that is the job of the people,” said Dipankar Bhattacharya, national general secretary of CPI-ML (Liberation).

Actor-playwright-filmmaker Bratya Basu, also Bengal’s education minister, said the Modi government was trying to create divisions on the basis of religion to win elections while selling off the nation’s vital resources on the side.

Setalvad said no party could be the custodian of the Hindu religion. “Hindu religion has many different facets, but here, a single party is trying to force something on the people. This is unacceptable,” she said.