West Bengal’s Left Front Chairman Biman Bose has launched a flat-out attack against Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, saying her party had ‘close rapport’ with the Jamaat-e-Islami in Bangladesh.
Addressing a huge protest rally at Kolkata’s Brigade Parade Ground attended by tens of thousands of supporters on Sunday, Bose said Mamata was ‘patronising the Islamic fundamentalist rejected by the people of Bangladesh’.
“She is giving them shelter here, she is patronising the politics of religious fundamentalism, she is playing a dangerous game,” the senior politician said in what was clearly the most outspoken criticism of Mamata’s Bangladesh policy.
“When Bangladesh police operate in Satkhira and Jamaat cadres have to flee, they get shelter from the Trinamul MP in Basirhat,” Biman Bose alleged.
“Why do you think she is obstructing the Centre from signing the Teesta water-sharing agreement, why is she opposing the land boundary agreement? All this because she wants to please the Jamaat-e-Islami and put (Sheikh) Hasina in difficulty,” he continued.
Bose said one of the MPs Trinamul Congress, Ahmed Hassan, sent to Rajya Sabha in last week’s polls is closely linked to Jamaat. “He was a correspondent of Jamaat’s paper Naya Diganta.”
According to him, his party had all the details of the ‘thick links’ between Jamaat and Trinamul Congress.
“We Leftists strongly support the politics of secularism in Bangladesh that Hasina upholds. It is beyond our comprehension how a Bengali leader who says she is committed to secularism can support the defeated forces of 1971,” Biman Bose said.
He observed that the people of West Bengal “will never forgive” Mamata for “deliberately spoiling” the relations with Bangladesh.
The Left Front Chairman said the BJP was holding out a ‘carrot’ for Banerjee, as evident from Narendra Modi’s praise for her achievements.
“Will you be surprised if she does business with Hindu fundamentalists in India and Muslim fundamentalists in Bangladesh, all for the sake of power,” Bose asked.
The Left Chairman also said the US had boosted Mamata, first to topple the Left in West Bengal and then to ‘disturb’ Hasina in Bangladesh.
“The game is all out in the open now.”
Bose’s attack comes a week after former Left Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya attacked Mamata Banerjee for ‘spoiling relations with our natural friends in Bangladesh’.
He said Mamata had met the Pakistan High Commissioner in India Salman Bashir and called for better relations with Pakistan.
‘We want good relations with Pakistan but not at the expense of Bangladesh. Bangladesh is much more important for us,” Bhattacharya had said.
Bhattacharya had recalled the ‘positive initiative’ of his predecessor Jyoti Basu in pushing through the Ganges water-sharing treaty in 1997.
“We did it to put our relations on a firm footing. We have to address the genuine needs of Bangladesh. But now all that is jeopardised,” Bhattacharya had said.
Source: bdnews24
Jamaat has been rejected by the Awami League and India and not by the people of Bangladesh. Indians love to point fingers at others as if they are the greatest democracy in the world. Modi is the biggest terrorist that is there today. He will be elected by Indians to become their PM. What does that tell you? Simply a voting machinery could elect a terrorist same as Awami League got elected through the back door but by balloting by creating a one sided constitutional amendment just like what her father did in 1974. Remember BAKSAL! Thanks to India and her ever expanding RAW. For Indians to term Jamaat as a terrorist organization before telling it to Modi is obnoxious. Indians want Bangladeshis to be subservient to them just like what they tried in Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan. It will not work in Bangladesh.
In real terms Mamata Banerjee is more secular than these so-called left, the rejects of West Bengal politics. Mamata has more Muslims in her party and in important positions of her government than any other parties of India especially the so-called left ever have had.
If the Left party of West Bengal genuinely thinks that Bangladesh is a priority issue to them then they should focus on the country as a whole and more importantly, try to feel the pulse of the people and not tie its knot to a particular political party in country that by now has lost all legitimacy to govern. It is obvious that as far as Bangladesh is concerned Mamata has read the pulse of people of Bangladesh much better than that of her left colleagues.
A final message for Mr, Bose – his assertion that Mamata was ‘patronizing the Islamic fundamentalist rejected by the people of Bangladesh’ is completely off the mark. While it is true that Bangladeshis do reject “Islamic fundamentalism” but they make a clear distinction between ‘fundamentalism” and nationalism. What we are witnessing in Bangladesh these days is not rise of ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ but an Islamist/Nationalist movement. The entire nation is now waging an Islamist/Nationalist movement against the so-called secularist Awami League that by tarnishing the image of Islam in general and branding these nationalist Muslims as Taliban mainly to cajole the West and also to justify its brutal suppression of its opponents is there for every one to see. It is a pity that our West Bengal left do not see this. No wonder these left who believe in the myth that ‘people are with us’ never care to look behind.
Mr. Bose also needs to be reminded that by bartering country’s sovereignty for the guarantee of its tenure in exchange of disproportionately high concessions that it has given to India at the expense of the country’s own interest Awami League has not only irked the nation but in the process, alienating itself more and more from average Bangladeshis.
Here is something for Mr. Bose that he may not like to hear – the movement of freedom loving Bangladeshis against this self-seeking and slavish AL government is sure to intensify in the coming days and therefore, should Mr. Bose’s left wish to forge a more permanent and mutually appreciative relationships with its neighbour, it must learn to feel the pulse of the people more accurately and not view things from its intellectual ivory tower that has brought his party’s downfall in the first place.
Mamata does not care what happens to Bangladesh. If her actions bring her more votes in West Bengal, she will always do what she is doing.