KOLKATA, India: At least seven people were killed and dozens more injured in India Saturday after clashes over local polls in West Bengal, a state notorious for political violence during election campaigns.
India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has in recent years worked hard to gain a toehold in West Bengal — ruled by a communist party for much of its history — to swell its reach beyond its Hindi-speaking northern heartlands.
Voters are currently casting their votes in a fierce contest to elect municipal heads, with more than 200,000 candidates across the state of 104m population.
“Seven people have been killed and dozens wounded in poll-related violence in different villages across the state,” Jawed Shamim, additional director general of West Bengal’s police force, told AFP.
Another police official, requesting anonymity, said five of the dead were from the Trinamool Congress party, which is ruling the state. The other two were associated with the West Bengal’s Communist Party of India (Marxist) and BJP.
Footage aired by local media showed rival party workers roaming streets with batons in their hands as well as ballot boxes snatched and set ablaze outside polling stations.
Other polling stations saw a heavy security presence with paramilitary troops standing guard to keep law and order.
Police said over 200 crude bombs — a staple of West Bengal polls sold cheaply in the black market to maim or intimidate voters — had also been seized during the voting, police said.
Trinamool leader Mamata Banerjee has been ruling West Bengal since 2011 after her party defeated the Communist-led administration that had ruled the state for the prior three decades.
Banerjee, a fierce critic of PM Modi, has accused his Hindu nationalist Bhartia Janta Party (BJP) of attempting to import divisive sectarian politics into the state, which has a large Muslim minority. Modi has in turn, accused her administration of rampant corruption.
But the roots of political violence in the state date back decades, with police logging thousands of murders around voting time since the 1960s.
During state polls in 2021 — won emphatically by Trinamool but with a strong BJP showing — several activists from both parties were shot or hacked to death, their bodies sometimes hung from trees as an intimidation tactic. —AFP
