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Army out on streets, civil war likely: Mamata
TNN | Dec 2, 2016, 06.33 AM IST
West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee addresses a press conference in Kolkata on Thursday. (PTI Photo)
KOLKATA: Bengal CM MamatanBanerjee escalated her eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with the Narendra Modi government on Thursday , accusing it of trying to intimidate the state by stationing Army trucks on national highways and at toll posts and raising the spectre of a "civil war".
Banerjee dug her heels in, saying she would not leave Nabanna, the Bengal secretariat, till the Army trucks moved off the road, even as several of these trucks stayed at the toll post on Vidyasagar Setu, less than a kilometre from the CM's office, around 11pm.
Army spokespersons denied there was anything sinister in this and explained it as an annual three-day exercise held by the Eastern Command to get statistical data on trucks that might need to be requisitioned during a contingency. Friday is the third and final day of the exercise.
Army officials also said they were taken aback at the state government's response to the "routine annual affair" though TMC leaders claimed they had not seen anything of "this scale ever in Bengal". Army trucks were also posted at a toll plaza in Palsit in Burdwan, near Dankuni and in Murshidabad, they claimed.
Banerjee insisted that the "interference" in a state's affairs was worse than what happened during the Emergency ."This move is undemocratic, unethical, unconstitutional and politically motivated. I head an elected government and I am guarding democracy in Bengal. I won't hand it over to the Army ," she added.
"An alarming news has reached me. I have cross-checked with police. They (the Army) are checking vehicles on national highways. How can they do it without informing us? The road belongs to the state. The state needs to be informed before even running a mock drill.This only happens in an emergency situation," the CM said.
"What they have done in Bengal today may be repeated in Bihar and Punjab tomorrow. And, in the process, the country is heading towards a civil war," Banerjee said. She later asked state chief secre tary Basudeb Banerjee to write to the Centre. "This is a matter against which all states should protest. I will call on the President if I get an opportunity," she said.
Trilok Bhalla
But Army spokespersons said the Bengal government had got its facts wrong. "Vehicles are spotted to get basic parameters like make and load capacity. The vehicle is then marked so that the next checkpoint knows the vehicle has already been checked. There is nothing alarming about this and it is carried out in accordance with government orders. This gives us an estimate about the number of vehicles that are passing through a certain area, which can be tapped during operations," ministry of defence CPRO in Kolkata, Wing Commander S S Birdi, said.
Trinamool leaders, however, said "the Army surveillance" was another instance of the Centre intruding into the state's domain.
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