At least 16 dead during local elections in the Indian state of West Bengal

8 (EUROPA PRESS)

At least 16 people have died in the Indian state of West Bengal, which in recent hours has become the scene of intense electoral violence, where representatives of the main political parties in contention have denounced at least a dozen deaths among their supporters just before voting in the local elections that are held this Saturday.

Two large parties attend the elections, beginning with the Trinamool Congress (TMC) led by Mamata Banerjee, who has been the chief minister of the state — whose capital is Calcutta — for 12 years. The party is a splinter of the country’s main opposition party, the Indian National Congress, and is competing at the polls against the Indian government party, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata (People’s Party, or BJP), with the Secular Party. Indian as the third electoral force.

The TMC has denounced the death of eight of its militants, while there would be one death from the BJP, another from the Communist Party of India (Marxist), another from the Congress and another from the Indian Secular Front.

The BJP has already called for the declaration of the President’s Government in all of West Bengal so that the region comes under the direct control of the Indian president, Draupadi Murmu.

Representatives of the Trinamool Congress and the BJP have accused the deaths of supporters of both parties during the last hours after massive confrontations with firearms, burning of ballot boxes, the use of Molotov cocktails against polling stations and other acts of violence that have turned these elections, in the words of the state governor, Ananda Bose, “in a fight between votes and bullets”.

The violence has not prevented voters from going to the polls in what experts from the ‘Hindustan Times’ consider good proof of the sectarianism that dominates these elections: by mid-morning, 36 percent of the population had cast their vote for the elections in the middle of of incidents such as the one that occurred in the Parganas district, where two children were injured by the explosion of a homemade bomb.

The BJP has denounced in recent hours that the state Election Commission has systematically ignored its requests to deploy an additional contingent of state security forces, which has allowed supporters of the Trinamool Congress to run free to sow chaos. .

“This is not an election, this is death. The fire of violence is spreading throughout the state,” denounced the local BJP leader, Suvendu Adhikari. “The security cameras do not work, there are no security forces. This is not a vote, it is a looting that is taking place due to the collusion between the Police and the thugs of the Trinamool Congress,” he declared in comments collected by the ‘Hindustan Times’.

The Trinamool Congress has made exactly the same accusations against the BJP. “The recent incidents of violence not only raise serious questions about the competence and preparation of the security forces, but also expose the vacuity of the claims made by the BJP to guarantee peaceful elections,” he laments on his Twitter account.