By IANS,
Kolkata : A top leader of West Bengal’s Left Front (LF) government Wednesday said a section of the police was in dilemma after the ruling combine’s Lok Sabha debacle as they feel a “new force” is emerging in the state.
The LF, ruling the state for the last 32 years, lost the recent polls, managing to get only 15 of the 42 Lok Sabha seats from the state.
The opposition Congress-Trinamool Congress and Socialist Unity Centre of India (SUCI) alliance won 26 seats while the BJP bagged one.
“A section of the police force is in dilemma. They don’t know how to react in the current scenario. They feel the state is going through a transitory stage after the Lok Sabha polls. They think though they have till date listened to the Left Front, now a new force is coming up,” LF partner Revolutionary Socialist Party leader and state PWD minister Kshiti Goswami told IANS.
He said those serving the police as sources seem to have lost the zeal they had earlier.
“They are not working as actively as they did earlier and at times (they are) not providing police with proper information in time,” said Goswami, who raised the issues in Wednesday’s LF meeting.
Goswami, who has been vocal in his criticism of major partner Communist Party of India-Marxist’s (CPI-M) handling of issues like Singur and Nandigram in the past, said lower level functionaries of the LF partners were annoyed at the government’s soft handling of the situation in trouble-torn Lalgarh.
“They are annoyed with the ongoing violence at Lalgarh. They think with forces like the Maoists and other opposition parties trying to destabilise the government, the administration should act more stringently and take strong action to stop the violence. They are putting pressure on the administration from down to stop this anarchy-like situation in Lalgarh,” he said.