Kolkata: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Thursday highlighted the alleged forceful attendance of school students and self-help group (SHG) workers at a public rally addressed by West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee at Singur in Hooghly district.
The rally was held on Wednesday afternoon, and two BJP leaders have alleged that pressure was put on the mandatory attendance of the school students and SHG workers.
The BJP’s Information Technology Cell Chief and the party’s central observer for West Bengal, Amit Malviya, and the Leader of Opposition (LoP) in the Assembly, Suvendu Adhikari, on Thursday levelled allegations at the ruling party.
Malviya has shared a video on his official social media handle, X, showing pictures of school students brought to the Chief Minister’s Singur rally and claimed that this syndrome proves that the Trinamool Congress-ruled West Bengal government was now resorting to the exploitation of schoolchildren to create a counter-narrative to the crushing popularity of the Chief Minister in the state.
“Desperation on display in Singur — School children said they were instructed by their teachers to attend Mamata Banerjee’s rally at Singur. This is not mobilisation, this is misuse of schools and children for political optics,” Malviya claimed in his statement describing the video.
“Parents arrived at school to pick up their children, only to find them missing. Where were they sent? To Trinamool supremo and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s rally in Singur. Using schoolchildren for political rallies is shameful and unacceptable. Saving Bengal is now more urgent than ever,” he wrote on X.
According to him, the exploitation of the schoolchildren on this count was triggered by the fact that the tactics of pressuring ICDS workers and individual three-wheeler drivers to assemble at such ruling party rallies by threatening them that their names would be struck off welfare schemes were not working anymore.
“So now, pressure is being shifted to schoolteachers, who are being forced to bring students from different schools in Hooghly to pad up attendance. This is today’s West Bengal,” Malviya claimed.
According to him, in the current Trinamool Congress regime, classrooms have been turned into political supply chains, and precisely that is why parents are losing faith in government-run schools.
“Education suffers, institutions erode, and children pay the price. This is the clearest sign yet of Mamata Banerjee’s crushed popularity, when consent disappears, coercion becomes the tool of last resort,” Malviya added.
Earlier, LoP Suvendu Adhikari shared a purported audio clip on his social media handle, X, of a local woman leader of the Trinamool Congress and a member of a Self-Help Group.
In the audio clip, the woman leader was allegedly heard threatening a member of the Self-Help Group in the area with freezing of benefits under different welfare schemes unless they turn up at the said public rally.
(IANS)
