New Delhi: Violence during the nomination process for the panchayat elections has been pinned on the Mamata Banerjee government in West Bengal, which the BJP condemned as "a very dark chapter in the democratic history of the country" on Friday.
It said that the TMC government has taken "the system" into its own hands by causing the State Election Commission and the police to ignore violent situations.
The party has called on the Mamata Banerjee administration and the State Election Commission to uphold their legal obligations.
On the final day of nomination filing on Thursday, at least three people were shot dead and several more were injured throughout the state.
Multiple reports of violence occurred around the state, and law enforcement had a difficult time keeping the peace.
It hurts a lot to see the kind of violence that is happening in the West Bengal panchayat elections. The BJP's national spokesperson and Rajya Sabha MP Sudhanshu Trivedi said as much at a press conference at the party headquarters.
The "insensitivity" of the TMC government towards the violent episodes that occurred on the final day of nomination filing on Thursday was even more disheartening, he said.
According to Trivedi, several BJP employees were killed on the final day of nominations, but neither the state government nor the state election commission did anything to stop the attacks.
"The way the West Bengal government and the state police are behaving, this is going to be remembered as a very dark chapter in the democratic and electoral history of the country," he claimed.
The present situation in West Bengal has been described as "unfortunate" by BJP leaders. We have a list of 25-30 attacks on party members that resulted in serious injuries or death, he claimed.
"I want to tell the Trinamool administration and Mamata ji that the communist regime too played this game of violence... Just look at their state of affairs today," the BJP leader said.
According to Trivedi, the state government has a "constitutional responsibility" that it must meet.
There has been a failure on the part of the state electoral commission. He further stressed that the government should uphold its constitutional duties.
The BJP leader also cast doubt on the legitimacy of TMC candidates' nomination papers.
Bengal is divided into 341 sections. More than 40,000 TMC candidates filed nominations in 340 blocks in under 4 hours on the final day. According to his calculations, "that means the average time it took for someone to file their nomination was 2 minutes."
The BJP leader claimed that "filing of nomination at such a pace shows how the government has taken the system into its own hands," and he asked, "Is it not a mockery of democracy?" On Friday, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee reassured Bengal residents that the nomination process for the upcoming panchayat elections was proceeding peacefully, while criticising opposition parties for trying to make a big deal out of "one or two stray" instances.
Banerjee's remarks came after Governor C V Ananda Bose visited Bhangore, where supporters of two parties clashed the day before, resulting in three deaths, and urged that political violence in the state must come to an end.—Inputs from Agencies