2 killed in bid to keep rivals out of Bengal civic elections

KOLKATA: The panchayat poll process resumed in West Bengal on Monday — according to a Calcutta high court directive to enable opposition candidates to file their nomination papers — as did political violence.
Two persons were killed, one of them of gunshot wounds in Birbhum district, and the other at Swarupnagar in North 24-Parganas. Opposition supporters and lawmakers were attacked at several places across Bengal as Trinamool Congress supporters “guarded” government offices to prevent opposition candidates from filing their nomination papers. Trinamool, too, faced the heat in some pockets in North 24-Parganas and Jalpaiguri.





The opposition claimed that the extra day for filing papers served no purpose as day-long turf battles were fought in Birbhum, Malda, Murshidabad, North and South 24-Parganas districts — the same districts that had witnessed much of the violence during the first round of the nomination process, prompting the opposition to move court for more time to file papers. These were also the places about which the State Election Commission had issued alerts.

Meanwhile, the state poll panel failed to remove the uncertainty over poll dates as it spent Monday “collecting reports” from district administrations on the ground situation and how well they were equipped to handle a one-day vote. Opposition parties have demanded that the vote be spread over multiple days or the SEC ask for security forces from outside Bengal as the state police force may be too thinly stretched to secure all the 58,000 booths on a single day of polling.

Trinamool has demanded a one-day poll because of three factors: the one-monthlong fasting month of Ramzan (which starts in the middle of May), monsoon (which should be on its way by the middle of June) and the original poll notification (which says the entire process should end by mid-May).

The SEC will meet representatives of all parties and state panchayat department officer-on-special-duty Saurabh Das on Tuesday, but it may be veering round to either a one- or a two-day vote in the middle of May.

Monday’s gunshot death in Karidhya village on the outskirts of Suri led to nasty “body politics” between BJP and Trinamool. Firhad Hakim, Trinamool leader and state urban development minister, claimed that “Dilawar Shiekh” was killed by BJP’s contract killers.