West Bengal by-polls: BJP candidate Roughed up

Kolkata: A Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) candidate was badly roughed up and pushed into a bush amid allegations of electoral malpractice from various areas, as around 48 percent voting was recorded in the first six hours in the by-polls to three West Bengal Assembly constituencies on Monday.

Election Commission sources, however, said that notwithstanding sporadic incidents the situation was peaceful overall in the Kaliaganj, Kharagpur Sadar and Karimpur Assembly constituencies. “At 1 p.m., the polling percentage was 50 in Kaliaganj, 43 in Kharagpur Sadar and 51 in Karimpur,” the EC said.

Over 7.34 lakh voters are eligible to vote in 801 polling stations to choose their representatives from among 18 candidates, including three women. In Karimpur (Nadia district) the Trinamool Congress and the BJP were engaged in a no holds barred fight.

BJP candidate Jay Prakash Majumdar, the party’s State vice-president and a familiar face in television debates, moved around the constituency since the morning, notwithstanding strong resistance from the Trinamool cadres. He got involved in heated exchanges with some people, allegedly Trinamool supporters, at a booth in Thanarpara where the BJP alleged its polling agent had been abducted. Central forces personnel finally intervened and removed those people. Majumdar was shown black flags and ‘go back’ slogans were raised against him in Sahebpara after he was asked to leave a booth at Pipulkhola when the Trinamool alleged that he was going too close to the EVM machines.

But, things turned ugly outside the Ghiyaghat Islampur Primary school booth where Majumdar had gone after receiving news of alleged electoral malpractice and found eight outsiders in the room where meals were purportedly being prepared for polling officials. The officials, however, denied any knowledge of food being cooked for them only 10 meters from the booth. Majumdar removed the ‘outsiders’ and lodged a complaint with the district administration, but all hell broke loose when he came out of the booth onto the road. Around 50 people surrounded Majumdar, staged a demonstration, and then started slapping and punching him before pushing him into the bushes. As Majumdar tried to regain his composure, one of the protesters kicked him hard, sending him hurtling down further into the bushes. While State BJP president Dilip Ghosh called it an “attempt to murder”, State minister and Trinamool district observer Rajib Banerjee claimed Majumdar was either the victim of his party’s “factional feuds” or ‘orchestrated’ the incident himself to gain sympathy in the face of a ‘certain defeat’. (IANS)

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