| Sunday , October 11 , 2015 |
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1151011/jsp/frontpage/story_47393.jsp#.VhmtmFSqqko
TMC 37 OTHERS 4- Four fig leaves help the winner hide the 14-0 sweep in Salt Lake |
| Tamaghna Banerjee and Meghdeep Bhattacharyya |
 Fig leaf noun A flimsy or minimal cover for behaviour that might be considered shameful The Trinamul scorecard in the 41-ward Bidhannagar reads 37-4. The four fig leaves - Opposition victories in four wards that were held up as evidence of "free and fair" polls - hide the 14-0 sweep in the corporation's Salt Lake segment.  Trinamul bagged all the 14 wards in Salt Lake that was invaded on polling day by an army of impostors who committed vote fraud and assaulted several residents and journalists. All the four Opposition victories came from the Rajarhat-Gopalpur belt. Although conceived by the Congress's Bidhan Chandra Roy, Salt Lake grew and prospered to become what it is today during the Left Front rule and many of its leaders had made the township their home. Perhaps that is why chief minister Mamata Banerjee had reportedly insisted on a 14-0 sweep in the township during a pre-election meeting with senior leaders from the area. "Salt Lake ey shob chai (I want everything in Salt Lake)," she was quoted as telling her lieutenants. The real target achieved, the Bidhannagar tally of 37-4 has not displeased Trinamul. Trinamul insiders described the 37-4 result as "perfect". "Some of us, quite frankly, heaved a collective sigh of relief. Given the attention our mischief in Salt Lake has drawn over the past week, 41-0 would have hurt us further. The final 37-4 will help us salvage our reputation somewhat," said a senior MLA from south Calcutta. "But there still will be talk on the very unlikely 14-0 achieved in Salt Lake," he added. Once hooliganism transformed what was merely a corporation election into the biggest embarrassment for the Mamata government in recent times, Trinamul was hoping the result would not be entirely one-sided. "With these results, we have established that we are the people's preferred party and the allegations of electoral malpractice are baseless," said party secretary-general Partha Chatterjee after the results. "People have democratically rejected the politics of disruption, violence and bandhs. They have voted for development." The claim may carry a ring of exaggeration but sources in the Opposition conceded that the overall outcome would not have been much different had the poll panel and the administration played by the rules to ensure free and fair polls. "Organisationally, we have become very weak in Salt Lake. After recent defections, we have become weak in Rajarhat-Gopalpur, too. The results could have been a bit different perhaps, had there been no violence, but the board would have been formed by Trinamul anyway," said a CPM state secretariat member. "But we will keep highlighting the violence till the 2016 Assembly polls," he added. An analysis of the results suggests the Trinamul sweep in Salt Lake is not without blemishes. Take, for instance, the curious case of Anindya Chatterjee, who won with a margin of 852 votes in Ward 41 - from where most complaints of what the election commission called "vitiation of the poll process" had emerged.  The votes Chatterjee got on October 3 (the original polling day) in some booths and on October 9 (the repolling day) in the three booths show remarkable variance. In booths where repolls were held, Chatterjee got less than 20 per cent votes. But in adjacent booths, where there was no repoll, he had bagged votes ranging from 50-80 per cent. Independent candidate Anupam Dutta, a former Trinamul councillor who was aggrieved after he was denied a ticket, said the repoll figures of Ward 41 revealed how the residents of Salt Lake actually voted. But Anindya Chatterjee attributed it to a "malicious campaign" by the media. "A lot of people baselessly alleged rigging. There was none on the actual poll day. In fact, the repolls were rigged by Anupam. Otherwise, my margin would have been much higher. The media has maligned me, turning a lot of people against me even during polling hours," Chatterjee said. Margins also tell a tale. The biggest margin was in Ward 4 - Trinamul's Shahnawaz Dumpy Mondal defeated CPM's Sheikh Mainuddin by 8,107 votes. In civic elections, such high margins are unusual. Leader of the Opposition Surjya Kanta Mishra said the numbers in several wards spoke for themselves, the polls were "massively rigged" and the "tainted victory" was a "moral defeat" for the ruling party. |