Thousands join Jail Bharo protest in Bengal

In what looked like a programme that could provide some oxygen to a moribund Left movement the Bengal Marxists on Thursday derived considerable success in their Statewide Jail Bharo (court arrest) agitation against the Narendra Modi Government’s “anti-farmer and anti-working class” policy.

Hundreds of people were arrested even as thousands marched to the administrative centres in districts from Coochbehar in North Bengal to Diamond Harbour, Howrah, Purulia, Burdwan and Kolkata in the South, sources said.

On the impressive turnout of people — at a time when the BJP was fast eating into the base of the Left Front — senior Marxist and Left Legislature Party leader Sujan Chakrabarty said, “the Left Front is not worried about their growing base as it is the result of a divisive politics played by both Mamata Banerjee and BJP which is bound to get halted because finally the people will want their real issues like,

unemployment, health, poor wages, inflation, unfavourable price for farmers’ crops will come to the fore. The Left cannot be decimated and they will never be.”