New Delhi, Oct. 13 -- For those of us who have long suffered in West Bengal, the anti-SIR howls of the Congress, Left and TMC stink of unalloyed hypocrisy.
The last Congress Chief Minister of West Bengal was Siddhartha Shankar Ray, a Bengali bhadralok and barrister who had facilitated the imposition of the Emergency by Indira Gandhi. That was fifty years ago. One doesn't foresee another Congress Chief Minister of West Bengal for at least the next fifty years.
The "Family" Congress minions will tell you that it was Ray who had instigated Indira to impose the Emergency; left to herself, she would not have done it. The Nehru family courtiers always look for a scapegoat. For Nehru's debacle in 1962, it was K M Panikkar and Krishna Menon; for Indira in 1975, it was Ray; and for Rajiv in 1989, it was his "Doon School" coterie of Arun Nehru and Arun Singh.
The current AISA-CPIML cabal may not know about the third-degree treatment that Ray administered to Charu Mazumdar (CM) and his ideological children, the Naxals. Ray's third-degree treatment broke the upsurge's back for good in West Bengal. With Charu killed and Kanu (Kanu Sanyal) debilitated, many of these AISA types fled the country and ensconced themselves in Ivy League institutions in the West, which they had been berating. But Siddhartha Shankar Ray is someone the present Congress would want to forget. Remembering Ray makes it difficult for the Congress to hold aloft the CPIML flag today.
In 2026, after fifty years, ordinary voters in West Bengal felt relieved that they could cast their own votes. It was the first election in fifty years that saw no bloodshed, bombing or killing. Every voter could cast her or his own vote without fear of being bullied or bludgeoned. It was a milestone in free India's democratic reassertion.
Bombing, terrorising voters, killing opposition candidates, booth jamming and capturing, locking high-rise communities, enabling ghost voters to cast their votes while chasing away legitimate voters who had come to vote - all had become part of the electoral grammar in West Bengal.
The Congress had introduced these murderous methods in the early 1970s, the Left-CPI(M) had institutionalised them, and the TMC had mastered that dark art. The killing of candidates and workers of opposition parties, in the TMC's case, for instance, had been normalised in West Bengal. Those yelling "Vote-Chori" today had perpetrated and abetted this violence.
The Congress, the CPI(M) and, later, the TMC have also unabashedly aided and facilitated infiltration from across the border into West Bengal. Over the decades, they have consolidated these illegal immigrants into a vote bank. While SIR in West Bengal enabled genuine voters to vote, it also cleansed the electoral rolls of these ghost and illegal voters.
For decades, the Congress-Left-TMC ecosystem encouraged and justified this infiltration. T V Rajeswar has left behind an authentic record. A Nehru family acolyte and admirer, especially close to Rahul Gandhi's grandmother, a former Director of the IB and former Governor of Uttar Pradesh, Rajeswar was Governor of West Bengal between 1989 and 1990.
The "resign CEC" cartel has a record of stalling any attempt to detect and deport infiltrators. Take the case of the Prevention of Infiltration Programme of 1963, proposed by the then IB Director, B N Mullik. The programme was implemented with support from the governments of Assam and West Bengal. During 1963-65, Rajeswar wrote in a series of articles he penned in 1996 for a leading English daily, "about 150,000 illegal immigrants were repatriated to East Pakistan." The scheme was, however, "abandoned in 1967 after a strident campaign was unleashed by interested parties."
As Governor of West Bengal, Rajeswar undertook extensive tours of the border districts. Rajeswar's study of reports on the border belt of West Bengal yielded "some telling statistics."
Between 20 and 40 per cent of villages in these districts, he wrote, were "predominantly Muslim. There are indications that the concentration of the minority community, including the Bangladesh immigrants, in the villages has resulted in the majority community moving to urban centres. Several towns in the border districts are now predominantly inhabited by the majority community but surrounded by villages mostly dominated by the minority community." He cited this as a "security threat."
Basing his assessment on various reports and his extensive tours, T V Rajeswar concluded that, in 1989, in 50 per cent of West Bengal's 294 Assembly constituencies, "Bangladesh immigrants could play an important role" in influencing the results. "Does this explain," he asked, "why the Bangladesh immigrants have been extended extra-legal facilities by every government in West Bengal, whether of the Congress or CPI-M? They were treated more as vote banks than as an economic, demographic or law and order problem."
Among his proposals to tackle this gargantuan national security challenge was the deletion of infiltrators' names from the electoral rolls - "their names should be deleted from the electoral rolls."
It riles the actual "Vote-Chors" that SIR has successfully detected and deleted their illegal "Vote-Bank". It is making them yelp in desperation.
Views expressed are personal. The writer is member NEC, BJP & Chairman, Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee Research Foundation
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from Millennium Post.