Elements of an insidious design

26/11/2014

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee's accusation that the Bharatiya Janata Party had stage-managed the Burdwan blast case and that National Security Advisor Ajit Doval, who is supervising the probe the National Investigation Agency is conducting, is an “RSS man”, is fit material to be dismissed with the contempt it deserves. But Ms Banerjee's rant is not just that of a leader who is on the back foot and has resorted to rabble-rousing to wriggle out of a political crisis largely of her own making. It has elements of an insidious design by the Chief Minister to exploit for parochial self-interest what is clearly an anti-India (and even an anti-Bangladesh) terror plot.
This makes her allegation dangerous, and it can be only hoped that she realises she is playing with fire that will not only singe her, her party's and her Government's image, but also create serious security problems for the country. The NIA has unearthed enough material so far to establish that the people behind the blast had links with various interests here and abroad who were bound by the common goal of wreaking violence and social division in India and undermining the authority of Bangladesh's Government of Sheikh Hasina which has cordial relations with New Delhi and has gone out of the way to crack down on anti-India elements on its soil. There have been arrests in connection with the case even in Bangladesh.
There is no way Ms Banerjee can negate the facts on the ground. It beats reason how the BJP regime could have stage-managed the blast in Burdwan. Instead of irresponsibly pointing fingers at the Union Government, she must confront the fact that the building where the blast occurred had been occupied by a Trinamool sympathiser; there had been Trinamool Congress flags on the building which were quickly removed after the incident; people arrested from the site have been found to be entertaining connections with dubious elements in the country and abroad; probe officials are slowly but surely getting to the bottom the complex terror plot. Instead of turning against the NIA, the National Security Advisor and the Narendra Modi Government, Ms Banerjee, as an elected representative responsible for the safety and security of not just West Bengal but the country as a whole, should have extended full cooperation to the Centre. Nobody has claimed that Ms Banerjee is responsible for the terror plot. Thus, the diatribe by some of her senior party leaders against the BJP and their belligerent protestation of being ‘patriotic' and ‘nationalist' are misplaced. The more she and her party continue thus, the more they will solidify the anti-national elements behind the Burdwan case. These people will use her politics to deflect public attention from their nefarious designs and project themselves as innocent pawns in the ‘anti-minority' battle the Modi Government is supposedly indulging in. Indeed, Ms Banerjee's strategy here is precisely to keep her minority vote-bank intact; she believes that by either downplaying the Burdwan issue or pinning the blame for it on the BJP, she can consolidate those votes. Whether that will happen is immaterial. What is worrisome is that the country's security is being put to test through cases such as the Burdwan incident.

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