New Delhi: How important are the police to an electoral result in Bengal? "More important than the politician, and only slightly less important than the voter," quipped a retired IPS officer.
With Bharati Ghosh, retired IPS officer once considered close to West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee, the BJP hopes they have cracked the formula for Bengal.
Ghosh, who is under the state Criminal Investigation Department (CID) for extortion, joined the BJP on Monday in Delhi in the presence of union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, BJP's Bengal in-charge Vijayvargiya and TMC-turned-BJP leader Mukul Roy. For the past year, West Bengal has been tracking Ghosh and while joining, she attacked both Mamata and Rajeev Kumar.
"(If) Rajeev Kumar is the best officer in the world. Why, being the head of the SIT (probing chit fund scams), he did not take action against anyone?” said Ghosh.
And there lies the importance of Bharati Ghosh, said a BJP leader. Ghosh, along with Rajeev Kumar, were the two top cops in Banerjee’s administration. By pitting the two against each other, and by extension using Ghosh to counter Banerjee’s alleged use of the police during polls.
A key officer in Mamata Banerjee's crackdown on Maoists, her rise in the party, catalysed by her closeness to Mamata, was swift. It was this proximity to the political leadership that prompted Ghosh's transfers in the 2014 and 2016 West Bengal Assembly polls, after the opposition complained to the EC. "She knows the inner workings of the TMC. Especially, how the TMC uses the police during elections to ensure that a free and fair election is avoided. She can counter that," explained a senior BJP leader.
Ghosh, the BJP believes, can counter Rajeev Kumar - the Kolkata police chief for whom Mamata Banerjee staged a three-day dharna against the CBI and the BJP. Described now by Mamata Banerjee as one of the best officers in her state, Kumar's ability with electronic surveillance has put him in the crosshairs of more than one opposition leader. Ahead of the 2016 elections, BJP president Amit Shah referred to him as the “snooping cop of Kolkata” and alleged that he “conducts illegal surveillance and interception on (opposition) leaders”. Shah demanded that the EC remove him and said that Kumar was behind a purported sting of former BJP state president Rahul Sinha.
The BJP had alleged in successive elections that the TMC was using the police to influence polls - an allegation almost eerily similar to Mamata Banerjee's allegation, while she was in opposition, of CPIM's 'scientific rigging'.
In order to avoid any possibility of such 'scientific rigging' in the state, the ECI had appointed three divisional commissioners of Bengal as observers for the electoral roll revision process - with a specific mandate. The BJP alleges that it didn’t work.
Some of the aspects of 'scientific rigging’ are enrolling bogus voters in electoral rolls, deleting anti-ruling party voters and terrorising them to ensure they don't make it to polling booths, driving out poll agents of other political parties from booths and casting bogus votes in favour of themselves etc. “In all of this, the police are key. There are paramilitary forces on the ground. But ultimately, it is the state police. They know the lay of the land and they know the people,” said a senior police officer.
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