BJP MP Arjun Singh’s residence on the outskirts of Kolkata was freshly attacked using crude bombs at around 8:30 AM on Tuesday morning. Goons tried to target the backyard of his house in Jagatdal, North 24 Parganas district. The latest attack comes a week after a similar incident was reported targettng the same residence!
Earlier, crude bombs were thrown at Singh’s house early on September 8. The BJP said that the goons associated with the Trinamool Congress (TMC) were behind the attack. Back then, the West Bengal governor Jagdeep Dhankhar said that “wanton violence in Bengal shows no sign of abating”.
Dhankar added that the violence outside the parliamentarian’s residence shows the worrisome condition of law and order in the state. The governor has been frequently raising the issue of post-poll violence against opposition leaders and workers ever since the Assembly election results were announced earlier this year. The governor said he flagged his concerns to chief minister Mamata Banerjee but apparently the TMC is still baying for blood.
On Monday, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) took over last week’s bomb attack case and the very next day the house was bombed again! While no one was hurt, the explosion left marks on the iron gate of the house. The MP was not present at his home when the incident took place but his family was inside.
Reacting to the incident, Arjun Singh said that criminals are roaming freely and added that the police are working as brokers of the ruling TMC regime. He said that he is not afraid of such attacks. In 2019, Singh had shifted over from the Trinamool Congress (TMC) to the BJP and won the Lok Sabha seat from the Barrackpore constituency.
Ritesh Tiwari, vice-president of BJP’s Bengal unit, said that this incident shows that goonda raj is continuing in Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress government. Suvendu Adhikari tweeted that these bomb attacks validate allegations that the perpetrators have been assured of impunity by their handlers within the WB Administration. If this is the state of affairs of MPs and MLAs in West Bengal, one can imagine the condition of the common man in the state.
In Sep 2019, Singh was targeted by the local police. People were protesting peacefully when Police Commissioner Manoj Verma lathi-charged him on his head, all the while verbally abusing him.
He ended up in hospital with several stitches on his forehead. Simultaneously, Singh’s residence too was attacked. He told the media that these attacks were directed by the Mamata Banerjee government.
Jyotipriyo Mullick, West Bengal cabinet minister, claimed that Arjun Singh had ‘staged’ the attack and was hurt by a bomb hurled by a BJP worker. The local police claimed that a BJP supporter threw a brick at his own elected MP. Both the TMC and the local police blamed the BJP legislator for ‘provoking violence’.
Following last week’s attack, the TMC tried to whitewash its crimes by blaming what it calls the Bengal BJP’s ‘internal feud.’ Chances are they will stick to the same excuse this time around.
The situation in West Bengal is no different from any dictatorship in the Middle-East or Africa. If such attacks on MPs, MLAs and ordinary citizens had been taking place in a BJP-ruled state, one can rest assured we would be hearing sermons about ‘dissent as safety valve of democracy‘, ‘democracy under threat‘, ‘country getting a bad name‘ etc. from judiciary and intelligentsia. But Hindu lives are so cheap that the same elites are hardly bothered about events in WB, and the center also appears helpless. If this is what we get from being a secular democracy, it is high time that we the citizens questioned the very fundamentals of our system.
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