“Going by the ruling dispensation’s high-handedness against Opposition parties and their candidates in West Bengal, I must say that Adhikari is targeting the Opposition parties exactly the way Mamata Banerjee had done against Opposition parties and their candidates during her chief ministerial tenure,” Chowdhury told ET.
Also Read: Mamata’s backing of Congress in Nandigram bypoll signals possible reset in Bengal opposition politics
While Banerjee has been accusing Adhikari of misusing the state machinery to flex his muscle against Opposition parties and force the party candidate to withdraw from the fray, Chowdhury, a member of the Congress Working Committee, gave his perspective. “The fact is, Suvendu Adhikari has taken a leaf out of Mamata Banerjee’s book. He has stepped into the shoes of Mamata Banerjee to target, blackmail and unleash state power against the Opposition parties. What Suvendu is doing is ditto what Mamata Banerjee had done against the Opposition parties when she was running the TMC government in West Bengal,” he said.
Maintaining “flip-flop” by TMC (Mamata faction) candidates in the bypolls, with one already refusing to contest and another withdrawing one day and re-entering the next day, Chowdhury said, “Only Congress and our candidates, including the one who is arrested and jailed in Nandigram (and the other in Rejinagar), are staying the course and fighting BJP and the BJP government’s high-handedness as the only real opposition in West Bengal.”
Also Read: ‘TMC can do anything, if results are…’: Cong’s Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury alleges TMC’s ‘fear tactics’
About Mamata Banerjee announcing her party’s support to the Congress candidate in Nandigram, he said that was the course available to her after the TMC candidate left the fray. Although allies in INDIA bloc, Congress and TMC share uneasy ties in West Bengal.
Chowdhury, also a petitioner in the Supreme Court against SIR in West Bengal, said the recent scathing observations by the apex court and the West Bengal High Court against the slow process by the tribunals in reviewing the appeals of those whose names were deleted from the state electoral rolls once again showed “the Election Commission has done electoral anarchy in West Bengal in the name of SIR”.
