Kolkata: The Left Front on Monday alleged
that Trinamool Congress candidate from Jadavpur seat Manish Gupta, pitted against Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee,
is influencing voters by using his former bureaucratic
position and demanded that the EC take action against him.
Left Front chairman Biman Bose told a press conference
that Gupta was introducing himself to voters as an ex-DM of
South 24- Paraganas district, where the Assembly seat is
located.
"He is now merely a candidate with a Trinamool
Congress symbol. I do not know if he has joined the Trinamool
Congress yet. He is not a leader of Trinamool Congress. He is
trying to use his previous official position to influence
voters and the election," Bose said.
"We want the Election Commission to look into it and
take action," he said.
Bose alleged Gupta, a former chief secretary of West
Bengal, had written a letter to the Election Commission giving
names of some Left Front workers whom he described as
`anti-socials` with the potential to create trouble during
polling.
He said it is surprising that names given by Gupta
included a retired headmistress of a school and former party
councillor.
Bhattacherjee has been winning from the constituency
since 1987 and in the last assembly election in 2006 he had
won by a margin of 58,130 votes.
But a worrying factor for him is that in the 2009 Lok
Sabha elections CPI-M candidate Sujan Chakraborty had a lead
of only 19,077 votes from the Jadavpur segment and lost the
parliamentary seat to Trinamool`s Kabir Suman.
Moreover, in the 2010 Kolkata Municipal Corporation
elections, the CPI-M lost six wards under the Jadavpur
Assembly constituency, trailing behind Trinamool by a total of
10,927 votes.
In the remaining four wards, the CPI-M won by an
aggregate margin of 10,235 votes.
Bose charged that Trinamool Congress was using black
money in this election. He said that never before had people
seen such huge amounts of money in circulation as during this
Assembly election.
Foreign hands, keen on ousting the communist
government of the state, were at play in this election, he
alleged, but said people would frustrate all machinations of
`reactionary forces` to elect the 8h Left Front government.
PTI
