Author: Udayan Namboodiri
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: Aug. 7, 2005
Eminent citizens lay bare kolkata's capture
by CPM------- "Capture Kolkata", West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb
Bhattacharjee told the CPI(M) cadres at a rally held in the State capital
on February 13. Four months later, the CPI(M) truly "captured" the
Kolkata Municipal Corporation. And how!
In a front-page story headlined Rape of Democracy in City of Joy on June 28,
The Pioneer had presented a sampling of booth-wise results from the June 19
election to the civic body. The astonishingly high voter turnout and unbelievably
high victory margins posted by most CPM candidates pointed to the fact that
this was no ordinary election. In fact, it wasn't an election at all. Now,
a clutch of Kolkata's eminent citizens, under the banner of Ganamukti Parishad,
have presented to the Election Commission a compendium of facts and figures
which go a long way to prove that democracy is in serious trouble in not only
the City of Joy, but the entire province.
Leading this group is eminent economist Amlan Dutta, who has lent his name
to numerous mass and intellectual movements over the past 40 years. Others
include former additional director of RAW Bibhuti Bhushan Nandy, educationist
Sundanda Sanyal, linguist Rabi Ranjan Chattopadhyay and several others drawn
from the worlds of academia and civil services.
The delegation, led by Dutta, met Election Commissioner N Gopalaswamy when
the latter went to Kolkata on July 25. In their bulky memorandum, they narrated
how the Communists, since coming to power in 1977, systematically politicised
the police and administration, packed voter lists with fictitious persons,
infiltrators and often dead people. The document also laid bare how Bengal
had been brutalised by three decades of terror. But what happened in Kolkata
on June 19 was quite a man-bites-dog story. The Communists "won"
75 of the city's 140 wards - four more than the minimum requirement of 71
- by what Prof. Dutta describes in his document as "extensive and intensive"
rigging.
"As many as 30 wards (No 1 through 4,
10, 17, 18, 32, 34, 35, 39, 58, 59, 98, 100 through 104, 107 through 111,
114, 133, 134 and 136 through 138) saw CPM candidates capturing 90 per cent
votes. If the fraud could be stopped in just about five seats, the CPM could
not have captured KMC," the document points out. The Marxist laboratory
for devising poll manipulation had found a way to beat the EVMs. They deployed
EVMs which were not the same type as used in the rest of the country. In hundreds
of booths, they failed and were replaced by machines that had not been calibrated
earlier in the presence of candidate agents.
Has anybody anywhere in India ever heard of candidates getting 99.99 per cent,
99.98 per cent and 100 per cent of the votes cast? Welcome to Kolkata. Booth-wise
results furnished to EC show more than three voters voted per minute. That
has got to be the rate of polling because in many booths, over 1,200 voters
had gone through the process in eight hours in celebration of their unique
"democracy". The document also contains suggestions on what EC should
do so that next year's Assembly poll is not reduced to a farce. The plea for
a Central intervention is reiterated.
A specific list of Assembly seats have been
listed where paramilitary forces must be posted - not just on poll day but
for several months preceding the event - so that Marxists are prevented from
driving out opponents and terrorising voters with threats of converting married
women into widows if the results go against them. The Parishad has also requested
that the heavily politicised State Police be kept away from 102 of the 294
constituencies. Clearly, the EC's tom-tommed claims to fairness and neutrality
are on test. If it does not focus on Bengal, democracy may be denied to 80
million people 10 months from now.
* 30 wards saw CPM candidates capturing 90%
votes. If the fraud was stopped in just five seats, CPM could not have captured
KMC.
* A citizens' panel has narrated to EC how
CPM, has politicised the police, packed voter lists with fictitious persons,
infiltrators and the dead.
