Monsoon session of Assembly ends as both CPM and Cong hit the streets
Congress MLAs state their demands during the monsoon session of the Assembly in Agartala on Friday. Agartala, Sept. 25 : Pre-election frenzy is building up in Tripura and the cacophony of allegations and counter-allegations has begun.
The state is slated to go to the hustings in February-March next year.
The ruling CPM and its affiliated
organisations are staging sit-ins and holding rallies across the state
targeting the Congress-led Centre over various issues, especially
enactment of a comprehensive food security law.
The Opposition Congress is also organising rallies to press for its demands.
The party leadership, headed by PCC
president Sudip Roy Barman, recently organised “march to secretariat”,
where it submitted a 13-point charter of demands to chief secretary S.
Panda.
The very next day, the CPM organised
sit-ins in front of central government offices like All India Radio
(AIR) here, targeting the Centre. Addressing a large number of party
workers and supporters, CPM secretary Bijan Dhar said Marxists were
agitating all over the country, demanding an early enactment of the food
security act in Parliament.
“The Centre is allowing tonnes of rice and
wheat to rot in godowns when crores of people in the country live below
poverty line and cannot have two square meals a day,” he said.
Echoing CPM’s all-India general secretary
Prakash Karat, Dhar said unless the Centre enacts the food security act
or distributes surplus rice and wheat among the poor, the starving
people would seize the stocked godowns. “Their voices should reach
Delhi. We only demand monthly 35kg rice be made available to all
families in the country at Rs 2 per kg. We have done it in Tripura and
there is no reason why the central government in Delhi should back out
of this,” he added.
He claimed huge turnout at the party’s demonstrations in districts, subdivisional towns and block headquarters.
While the agitation is part of the CPM’s
campaign for the Assembly polls, the party is also mobilising school
students under the banner of SFI to ensure Left Front’s victory in the
next Assembly polls.
Yesterday, its youth wing, the Democratic
Youth Federation of India (DYFI), took out a rally here, in support of
the party’s demands.
Despite factional squabbles, the Congress,
too, staged a massive show of strength in its “march to secretariat” in
the presence of AICC general secretary and former Goa chief minister
Luizinho Faleiro and Union minister of state for finance Namarayan
Meena.
The party leaders did not spell out in so
many words but there were indications that the Congress had begun its
campaign for next year’s Assembly elections with the rally.
Congress leaders from Delhi concentrated
their firepower against the Left Front government. Interacting with
reporters, Meena sought to dismiss allegations of corruption in the coal
block allotment case. “The CAG’s findings are not the last words on the
issue; the CAG report will go to the Public Accounts Committee and then
it will be tabled in Parliament. Actually state governments, including
BJP and CPM-ruled states, had opposed competitive bidding citing many
grounds. We have their letters of objections and grounds for doing so,”
Meena said.
Meena and Faleiro said the Congress would
continue its agitation in the state till the elections and unseating of
Left Front from power.