West Bengal: Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee back to lead red Rally

KOLKATA: Former Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee is back in action again and that too, from his Assembly constituency of Jadavpur. He will kick-off a rally by the Left mass organisations on November 14 which has been organised to protest Narendra Modi government's anti-people policies and BJP's move to polarize the people on the basis of religion.

Left mass organisations will be organising rallies across the state for a week from November 14 and Bhattacharjee will kick-off the same from Jadavpur. The rally will cover 77,000 polling booths across the state.

Bhattacharjee has refrained himself from attending CPM polit bureau meetings which were held outside Kolkata since his defeat to Mamata Banerjee in 2011. He has virtually confined himself within four walls of Alimuddin Street, the party headquarters and people have not seen him leading any CPM rally on the streets of Kolkata. Party leaders have said that the former chief minister was not in a position to travel extensively due to his ill health. Bhattacharjee also managed to convince the top party leaders to drop him from the polit bureau, the highest decisionmaking body of the CPM. Accepting his appeal, the CPM did not include him in the new polit bureau set up during Visakhapatnam party congress held in April-May this year.

But after almost four and half years, Bhattacharjee has agreed to kick-off a rally from Jadavpur, the constituency he represented till 2011 when Mamata Banerjee ousted the Left Front government under his leadership. Bhattacharjee's decision has raised a few crucial questions like whether he is considering to come back to active politics again and whether the CPM has any plan to field him in the same Jadavpur seat in next year's Assembly elections. Questions are also being raised in political circles here whether Bhattacharjee will be the face of CPM again in next year's Assembly polls.

CPM top leaders have not clarified anything in regard to such queries.But they have made it clear that Bhattacharjee will attend the party plenum in Kolkata to be held from December 27. “He will give his opinions and thoughts on the contemporary political issues and will also address our Brigade Parade grounds rally from where top party leaders will virtually kick-off the party's poll campaign for next year's Assembly elections,“ said a senior CPM leader.

Very recently, Bhattacharjee has written a book which recorded a highest sale among all party documents released by the CPM. In his book “Phire Dekha“, Bhattacharjee has criticised some of the decisions taken by the first Left Front government under Jyoti Basu's leadership.