Clamping Art 324 in West Bengal unconstitutional; it's EC gift to Modi, thunders Mamata
Kolkata: Attacking the Election Commission of India for curtailing the campaigning for the last phase of polls in West Bengal, TMC supremo Mamata Banerjee Wednesday said it is an "unprecedented, unconstitutional and unethical gift" to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP president Amit Shah by the poll panel.
Banerjee, also the chief minister, said she had never seen this type of EC which is "biased and full of RSS people".
"There is no such law and order problem in West Bengal that Article 324 can be clamped. It is unprecedented, unconstitutional, unfair, unethical and politically biased decision" against which the state will move the Supreme Court, she said.
"Mr EC has given a gift to Narendra Modi and Amit Shah (by invoking Article 324) in West Bengal for vandalising the statue of Vidyasagar," she claimed at a press conference held at her Kalighat residence.
Kolkata witnessed wide-spread violence during BJP president Amit Shah's massive road show Tuesday. A bust of 19th century Bengali icon Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar was vandalised during the violence.
No violence had taken place during any other rally of Modi or Shah in the state earlier, she said and asked, "So where is the lawlessness?"
"The ECI is taking all the decisions at the behsest of the BJP. I have never seen this type of ECI ever. I think all the RSS people have been included in the ECI. The ECI is biased," she alleged.
In the first such action in India's electoral history, the EC on Wednesday invoked Article 324 of the Constitution to curtail the campaigning for the last phase of the election on May 19 in the wake of violence between BJP and Trinamool Congress workers in Kolkata on Tuesday.
It ordered that campaigning in nine seats will end at 10 pm on Thursday, a day before its scheduled deadline.
"I have never criticised any constitutional body but today the people of Bengal are under attack, the federal structure is under attack. The great son of this soil is under attack. There is a limit to humiliation and insult," she said.
The chief minister said she and the people of the state will fight this battle boldly.
"They can kill me or send me to jail but I am not afraid. I feel that the people of Bengal will give a suitable reply to you (Modi and Shah) through the ballot," she said.
Banerjee also alleged that Shah was solely responsible for carrying out Tuesday's violence in the city which was a "pre-planned criminal conspiracy".
"You (EC) have not taken any action against the culprits. There was no problem in any of the rallies other than that held by Amit Shah yesterday. Why was he (Shah) not showcaused? The EC is doing whatever the BJP is asking it to do," the TMC chief said.
Questioning the timing of the curtailment of campaign, Banerjee said, "Why hasn't the EC stopped campaigning from this moment? Is it because Modi has two rallies scheduled for tomorrow?"
She said the state government will move the Supreme Court to challenge the decision of the EC.
"Of course we will go to the Supreme Court after the elections. Now, the people are supreme and we will go to the people. They know everything," she said.
The poll panel also ordered the removal of Principal Secretary (Home) Atri Bhattacharya and Additional Director General, CID, Rajiv Kumar from their postings in West Bengal.
Banerjee said, "What wrong has the home secretary done? He has only written a letter asking the EC to take help of the local police. Law and order is a state subject."
Describing Rajiv Kumar as a good officer, she said, "Why are you (BJP) scared of Rajeev Kumar? You removed him because he is capturing hawala operators. Both the officers were removed not by the EC, but by Modi and Shah."
Banerjee has been claiming in her poll rallies that the BJP brought crores of rupees through hawala to be distributed among the people to buy votes.
She said till the sixth phase of the polling in West Bengal, only the central forces had opened fired and not the state police.
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Kolkata (PTI): The oath-taking ceremony of the first BJP government in West Bengal will be held at Brigade Parade Ground here on May 9, marking the saffron camp’s arrival in power in a state after decades on the political fringes.
The ceremony, scheduled to begin at 10 am, is expected to witness the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union Home Minister Amit Shah, BJP president Nitin Nabin, several Union ministers and chief ministers of BJP- and NDA-ruled states, party sources said.
“The new BJP government will take oath on May 9 at 10 am at Brigade Parade Ground,” state BJP president Samik Bhattacharya announced on Wednesday.
Even as the BJP leadership kept its cards close to the chest on the chief ministerial face, Leader of the Opposition Suvendu Adhikari has emerged as a frontrunner in internal discussions after cementing his position as the party’s principal mass leader in Bengal politics.
Adhikari, once among Mamata Banerjee’s closest lieutenants and a key architect of the TMC’s rural expansion in districts such as Purba Medinipur, crossed over to the BJP ahead of the 2021 assembly elections and went on to defeat Banerjee in Nandigram in one of Bengal’s fiercest political battles.
Five years later, he again found himself at the centre of Bengal’s political churn by beating Banerjee in her own turf at Bhabanipur by over 15,000 votes.
Other names for the CM post doing the rounds include Bhattacharya, Union minister Sukanta Majumdar and former Rajya Sabha MP Swapan Dasgupta, though party insiders indicated that the leadership was inclined towards projecting a “bhumiputra” face rooted in Bengal’s linguistic and cultural ethos.
During the campaign, Shah repeatedly asserted that the BJP’s chief minister in Bengal would be a “son of the soil”, born and educated in the state, in an attempt to blunt the TMC’s sustained attack that the BJP represented an “outsider” political culture alien to Bengal’s social and intellectual traditions.
The BJP bagged 207 of the 294 assembly seats in the recently concluded elections, ending the Trinamool Congress’s uninterrupted 15-year rule and scripting the saffron party’s biggest breakthrough in a state where it once struggled to open its electoral account.
Significantly, the swearing-in ceremony will be held on the 25th day of Baisakh in the Bengali calendar — observed across the state as Rabindra Jayanti, the birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore — lending the event a deeper cultural symbolism.
According to BJP leaders, the choice of the date is aimed at embedding the party’s historic rise within Bengal’s cultural imagination and countering the long-standing perception battle over identity and belonging.
Over the last decade, the BJP has steadily attempted to appropriate and reinterpret icons of Bengal’s cultural nationalism — from Tagore and Swami Vivekananda to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and Syama Prasad Mookerjee — as part of a broader ideological effort to expand its emotional and political footprint in the state.
Party insiders said the leadership was also conscious of the need to balance Bengal’s competing regional aspirations while choosing the chief ministerial face, with discussions also taking place around whether greater representation should be accorded to north Bengal, a region where the BJP has made substantial electoral gains over successive elections.
A meeting of the newly elected BJP MLAs has been convened on May 8 evening, party sources said, though the leadership remained tight-lipped over the final choice.
The Brigade Parade Ground ceremony is expected to mark not merely a transfer of power, but a defining moment in Bengal’s political history, the culmination of the BJP’s long ideological and organisational march from the margins to the centre of power in a state that had for decades resisted the saffron surge seen elsewhere in India.
