DIDI TAKES ROAD TO REDEMPTION

At no time was the Trinamool Congress’s stranglehold over West Bengal politics better demonstrated than at the 2018 panchayat polls—it won around 90 per cent of the seats, of which 34 per cent were uncontested.

- Romita Datta

Much of it was attributed to alleged violence and intimidatory tactics against opposition parties. But, with the next panchayat polls earmarked for early 2023, the TMC finds its unquestioned ground-level supremacy severely eroded. A spate of crimes in which TMC members were allegedly involved has led the widespread perception of the state being gripped by lawlessness; the alleged teachers’ recruitment scam and the arrest of former minister Partha Chatterjee has further deepened the distrust and dismay felt about the TMC’s governance. Some remedy is desperately called for. On November 10, at an administrative meeting in Ranaghat in Nadia district, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee asked public representatives and block development officers to cover even the remotest of villages on humble cycles and rickshaws, not stick to SUVs on welltravelled roads. With elected TMC panchayat officials also accused of high-handedness, it’s a hard road to redemption.

Indeed, battered and broken roads can well stand in as a metaphor for all the real problems people face, like those related to drinking water, healthcare and electricity—the chief themes that will influence voting to the three-tier panchayat system comprising zilla parishads, panchayat samitis and gram panchayats. “I request you to take roads seriously. Otherwise you’ll regret it later,” Mamata told the officials admonishingly.