The Left parties and the Congress may be drifting apart on electoral alliance but they have joined the Trinamool Congress in demanding the withdrawal of West Bengal Governor Jagdeep Dhankhar.
The Trinamool Congress has been officially demanding that Mr. Dhankhar be recalled by the Centre. Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee had said she has written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi three times on this.
Congress leader Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury on Saturday said the Trinamool Congress government should officially write to the President on withdrawal of the Governor.
Earlier this week, Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader and chairperson of the Left Front Biman Bose said the Governor was “identifying himself as a BJP man”. “The way the Centre is intervening in affairs of the State and the State government isn’t right. This includes the role of the Governor…What he is doing isn’t right either,” he observed.
On ties with the Left, Mr. Chowdhury said, “At this moment, we cannot say we are in alliance with Left parties or not”. The understanding with the Indian Secular Front (ISF) had tarnished the image of the alliance and its acceptability among people, he stated. The Congress had never allied with the ISF and the alliance was with the Left parties. “If we had an alliance with the ISF, then why they would put candidates against the Congress in Murshidabad district,” the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha asked.
Ever since the bad performance in the polls, when the Left and the Congress failed to win a single seat, differences in the alliance started appearing. The Congress and the Left are also divided over fielding candidate against Ms. Banerjee in the Bhawanipur bypoll.
Meanwhile, Mr. Dhankhar has completed his visit to Delhi. In fact, he met the Congress leader there. During the day, he met Union Home Minister Amit Shah, the second time in the past few days of his visit to the national capital. Speaking to journalists in Delhi, he said the rule of law must be restored in West Bengal.
Letter to Mamata
Before his visit to Delhi, he had written a strongly-worded letter to the Chief Minister on the post poll violence. “Your studied silence, coupled with absence of any steps to engage in rehabilitation and compensation to alleviate the unimaginable suffering of people, force an inevitable conclusion that all this is state driven,” he said.
The State Home Department responded, saying the Governor making the letter public was “violative of all established norms and disrupts sanctity of such communications” and the contents of the communication were “are not consistent with real facts”.
