Following panchayat polls, BJP women MPs visit violence-hit Bengal regions

A five-member team of women MPs from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in New Delhi visited Amta in West Bengal’s Howrah district on Wednesday with the aim to meet victims of panchayat post-poll violence. The team, appointed by the party’s national president JP Nadda, visited the violence-hit Deganga in North 24 Parganas on Tuesday and met people whose houses were burnt down and listened to first-hand accounts of arson. This is the second team of BJP MPs to visit Bengal after the party’s fact-finding team led by former Union Minister Ravishankar Prasad.
A woman claiming to be a BJP candidate had alleged that her house was burnt down by Trinamool Congress (TMC) goons. “We luckily escaped,” she told the team. Members of the team said they were “listening and seeing the real terror in the state”. They alleged that people had not been allowed to cast their votes and that fear of violence loomed large. A member of the team said, “Why is Mamata Banerjee silent on the atrocities and why is the administration doing nothing to protect the people? Gundaraj is prevailing here.”
The team, which will leave for Delhi on Wednesday evening, will submit their report to party president Nadda. The TMC, meanwhile, has denied allegations of violence and termed them as “baseless”. In the recently-held rural polls, the TMC won all 20 zila parishads in the three-tier panchayat system, bagging 880 seats, while its nearest rival BJP won 31 seats of the total 928. The Congress-Left Front alliance secured 15 seats while others won the remaining two seats. The ruling party of the stage emerged victorious in over 6,450 panchayat samiti seats. The BJP has won nearly 1,000 seats, while the CPI(M) and the Congress have won over 180 and 260 seats. The TMC won over 35,000 gram panchayat seats out of the total 63,219. The BJP won nearly 10,000 seats, while the Left-Congress bagged about 6,000 seats. While Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee claimed that 19 people, mostly from her TMC, died in poll-related violence since the election date was announced on 8 June, police sources have put the number of fatalities at 37.