As Enforcement Directorate, CBI get active on Bengal scams, Trinamool trains its guns on Suvendu Adhikari

KOLKATA: For the last one and a half months, West Bengal has been grabbing national attention because of the ongoing action by the Central Bureau of Investigation and the Enforcement Directorate on various scams like the West Bengal School Service Commission recruitment irregularities and cattle smuggling.

As the political climate in the state has become extremely hot over these developments, the ruling Trinamool Congress in a counter-attack is targeting the Leader of the Opposition in the Assembly, rather than the BJP leadership in the state.

Be it the administrative initiative to prevent Suvendu Adhikari from attending any anti-state government event or reiterating the demand for his arrest in the Narada video scam, the focus of the Trinamool Congress is to go all-out against Adhikari administratively and politically.

Suvendu Adhikari has his own logic to explain the Trinamool Congress's attack on him. "Actually, chief minister Mamata Banerjee could not accept the defeat by a margin of 1,956 votes to me from Nandigram in the 2021 West Bengal elections. So, since the beginning of her third term, she and her party have made me the target. But I am not scared and I will continue to perform my duty as a responsible Leader of the Opposition against this corruption-driven state government," he said.

Senior Trinamool Congress MLA Tapas Roy, however, rubbished this theory of Adhikari. "Everyone knows that his victory at Nandigram was the result of forgery taking advantage of a power cut during the final rounds of counting. Our contention is why are the central agencies silent on Suvendu, although he was named in the initial FIR filed by the CBI in the Narada video case where he was seen accepting cash in the video. We are objecting to the biased approach of the central agencies who are acting on behalf of the BJP and Suvendu is adding spice to that conspiracy," he said.

Political analyst Arundhati Mukherjee to an extent agreed with Adhikari. "It is quite possible that for the chief minister it was difficult to accept the fact that she was defeated in Nandigram and hence had to get elected through a by-election from Bhawanipur to retain her chief ministerial chair. But that cannot be the only or even the main reason behind this focused attack on Suvendu Adhikari. In my opinion, the main reason lies in the aggressive manner in which Adhikari is using his Leader of Opposition post to spearhead political attacks against the ruling party unlike his predecessors, which has prompted the Trinamool Congress to focus the counter-attack against him rather than the state unit of the BJP as a whole," she said.

According to her, since Mamata Banerjee became chief minister in 2011, she has confronted three Leaders of Opposition in the state assembly. "In her first term from 2011 to 2016, the Leader of the Opposition was veteran CPI(M) leader, Suryakanta Mishra, known for his excellent legislative debating power with occasional use of aristocratic satire. However, he lacked that aggressive punch to counter the shouting brigade of the treasury benches. In her second term between 2016 and 2021, the Leader of the Opposition was the Congress's Abdul Mannan. However, his entire term went in handling the internal politics in the state Congress and arresting the exodus of senior leaders from the party and he could hardly concentrate on his role as the Leader of the Opposition. In such a situation, Suvendu Adhikari with his aggressive approach has come as a surprise to the chief minister as well as the Trinamool Congress," she said. (IANS)

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