Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee on Tuesday held both the ruling CPM and the outlawed CPI(Maoist) responsible for the continuous violence and killings in different parts of West Bengal over the past few years.

Addressing a gathering of Trinamool Congress activists at Nandigram, where party worker and Sonachura gram pradhan Nashikanta Mandal was murdered a few weeks back, Mamata said: “The Marxists and Maoists are two sides of the same coin and Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee had given the Maoists a free passage to Nandigram in 2007 to kill our people.”

However, Buddhadeb was the primary target of her ire and Mamata even called the Chief Minister the “leader of a killer gang”. “It is the CPM which is killing our men in the name of Maoists. If the government can run joint operations against the Maoists who are killing people, why is no action being initiated against the ruling CPM which is also killing our men in different parts of West Bengal. Already 100 of our party activists and sympathisers have lost their lives in the hands of the CPM,” said Mamata.

“We want the Centre to intervene into the lawlessness in West Bengal. But we are not going to counter the bullets being used by the CPM against our men with bullets, but with ballots. The CPM has lost their support base during the last Lok Sabha polls and they will be nowhere after the 2011 Assembly elections,” she added.

Mamata, however, softened her stand on the joint operations being carried out on the Maoists in Lalgarh. “Who said I don’t want joint operations? But in the name of joint operation against Maoists, the CPM is trying to gain control over the areas,” she claimed.