Bengal polls: In phase-1, can Trinamool arrest the bleeding?

Elaborate security arrangements have been made to ensure free and fair polls in all the 30 Assembly constituencies going to the first phase of polls in the state, but will those 732 companies of central armed forces guarding the 10,288 polling booths be enough to remove the scar in people's minds in constituencies like Garbeta or Salboni? writes ETV Bharat News Coordinator, Dipankar Bose.

Hyderabad: Not water, but blood runs deep in the cracks that develop on the red, dry soil of Jangalmahal of Bengal where people will be queuing outside the polling booths across the districts of Jhargram, Bankura, Purulia, Paschim and Purba Medinipur on Saturday.

Elaborate security arrangements have been made to ensure free and fair polls are held in all the 30 Assembly constituencies which are going to the first phase of polls in the state. But will those 732 companies of central armed forces guarding the 10,288 polling booths be enough to remove the scar in people's minds in constituencies like Garbeta or Salboni? Or, for that case the trail of blood left by Maoist terror in the constituencies of Binpur, Nayagram, Gopiballavpur, Jhargram, Baghmundi, Balarampur or Bandowan?

No doubt the celebration of democracy brings in new hopes for the people at large, but both the Left Front, or to be more precise the CPI(M), and Mamata Banerjee know for sure what blood does in Jangalmahal. What blood does in the Garbeta and Salboni constituencies. Tapan Ghosh, the CPI(M) candidate from Garbeta and Susanta Ghosh, the CPI(M) candidate from Salboni, know better than most.

Every time an election happens in these two seats, the night of January 4, 2001 keeps coming back, haunting the prospects of the Left. It will be a repeat, tomorrow. That fateful night had seen a bloodbath of sorts in the Choto-Angaria village of Garbeta. Several Trinamool Congress supporters were gunned down by goons allegedly owning allegiance to the CPI(M).

Susanta Ghosh was a minister in the Left Front government at that time and two of his close associates, Tapan Ghosh and the party's zonal committee secretary Sukur Ali were alleged to be the masterminds behind the killings. Susanta Ghosh was also accused of being involved in the Garbeta skeleton recovery case and the CPI(M) even suspended him. The sensational murder case, where seven skeletons were dug out from near Ghosh's residence in Benachapra in 2002, came to be known as the Garbeta Skeleton Case and Susanta, a member of the West Bengal Legislative Assembly since 1987, was accused by the police of suppressing the crime.

But, the same Susanta Ghosh had deftly fielded Mamata Banerjee's 2001 slogan, “Keshpur is CPI(M)'s Shespur (end)” as well as the Trinamool Congress gale of 2011. But, by the time it was 2016, Susanta was barred from entering Paschim Medinipur by court order and TMC won the polls by a margin of over 61,000 votes. It took around three years for the wheels to turn and when the results of 2019 polls came in, BJP had outsmarted Trinamool by around 8,000 votes from the same Garbeta seat. CPI(M) knows it has no better bet than Susanta Ghosh or Tapan Ghosh or Himanshu Das from seats like Salboni, Garbeta or Khejuri. These tested hands who had once batted to retain the Red citadel, will face the electorate, tomorrow.

The first phase of polls for the 30 seats in Bengal's Jangalmahal is actually the newfound land for BJP. In the 2016 polls, Trinamool Congress had secured 27 seats leaving two for the Congress and one for the Left. BJP had drawn a blank. But, the arithmetic went astray in 2019 Lok Sabha polls, where Trinamool's tally plummeted to a mere 10 and BJP's soaring to 20.

Both, Congress and the Left, contesting this year's polls in a pre-poll alliance, were left high and dry. Other than six seats in Purba Medinipur district, Mamata could only bag the Binpur seat in Jhargram district as per the results of 2019. The saffron gale had virtually swept every other seat, which goes to the polls in the first phase.

For the record, BJP's vote share has registered a phenomenal jump from a bare three per cent to a brilliant 38 per cent between 2016 and 2019. It is a literal challenge for Mamata Banerjee to arrest any further bloodbath. Only May 2 will have the answers.