Kolkata, March 29 (IANS) Sharpening its attack on the West Bengal State Election Commission, the state’s ruling Trinamool Congress Friday alleged that letters penned by the panel were being drafted in the office of a rival political party.
“It seems to me that the letters being written by the commission are being drafted in the office of another political party,” Trinamool general secretary Mukul Roy told media persons here.
Roy accused the Commission, which is locked in a dispute with the Mamata Banerjee-led state government over the scheduling and deployment of central paramilitary troopers for the coming Panchayat polls, of delaying the elections.
Alleging a collusion between the commission and the opposition, he said: “The support for the CPI-M (Communist Party of India-Marxist) and the Congress has sharply declined. There is a conspiracy to delay the polls so as to defer the certain defeat of these opposition parties”.
Adopting a strident tone, Roy said the delay would only raise the temperature. “Now, if 10-12 people die during the polls, will the commission accept responsibility for that?”
Hinting that the erstwhile LF government had extended the tenure of the state election commission from three to six years with ulterior motives, Roy said: “The necessary amendment was passed only in 2010, when an imminent political change in the state was quite perceptible.”
Roy also ruled out a role for Governor M.K. Narayanan in the ongoing deadlock.
The governor has been playing an increasingly pro-active role in a bid to find a solution to the stalemate. He has already held two rounds of talks with the state election commission chief, and summoned state Panchayat Minister Subrata Mukherjee and senior bureaucrats at the Raj Bhavan.
“The governor has no role to play in the issue,” he said.
Mukherjee and Roy have been consistently training their guns on the commission ever since the dispute broke out.
While Mukherjee has termed the letters sent by the commission as containing “irrelevant and impractical suggestions’ and being drafted by “a school boy”, Roy earlier alleged that its chief was “favouring” the Left Front during whose reign she was appointed to the post.
