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Pistol and Brick

Visuals of a certain party activist outside a polling booth in Domkal municipality in West Bengal’s Murshidabad district with a…

Pistol and Brick

Domkal (FACEBOOK)

Visuals of a certain party activist outside a polling booth in Domkal municipality in West Bengal’s Murshidabad district with a pistol in hand and another charging towards a booth with a brick ~ emulating the Srinagar strategy? ~ are eerily reminiscent of the electoral mayhem in Salt Lake a couple of years back. Much as minister Partha Chatterjee claims that “overall, the polls were peaceful”, it was fairly obvious on Sunday that the Trinamul leadership has lost control over its cadres in some areas. The education minister’s statement would have been hilarious were it not for the profound implications on electoral politics a year before the panchayat elections.

The other critical feature of the municipal elections at Domkal, Pujali in South 24-Parganas, Raiganj, and Darjeeling is that never before has a police complaint been filed by the Opposition against the Chief Electoral Officer. Mercifully, the civic bodies in Darjeeling, Kalimpong, Kurseong, and Mirik were spared the kind of unchecked violence that convulsed the three other municipal areas, a testament as much to the restraint of the Gorkha Jan Mukti Morcha and the effectiveness of the district administration. Yet given Darjeeling’s record of violence since the mid-1980s, it doesn’t behove the likes of Bimal Gurung to claim that while Mamata Banerjee had failed to contain violence in the “plains”, the morcha had ensured free and fair polls in the Hills.

Having said that, it is the South Bengal scenario and that in Raiganj (North Bengal) that must be a matter of concern to the administration and the state election authorities. The Commissioner’s refusal to meet the Opposition delegation at the height of the violence has doubtless stiffened the attitude of the Left, Congress, and the BJP further still ~ “I was busy overseeing the election process,” was his perfunctory response. Hence the concerted demand for repoll in certain areas of the three municipalities.

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Could the deployment of central forces have minimised the possibility of violence? An answer to the query may not be available quite yet. Suffice it to register that while central forces were mobilised in the Hills, the request for similar precaution in the other areas was turned down by the SEC. The Supreme Court is yet to decide whether the commission has primacy over the state government while conducting civic and rural polls. It would be pertinent to recall the persistent kerfuffle between the former State Election Commissioner, Mira Pande, and the government over central deployment ahead of the local elections in 2013. The central force is presumed not to kowtow to the political dispensation.

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