Not govts job to find land for industrial house: Bengal Speaker

After Land and Land Reforms Minister Abdur Rezzaq Mollah and Housing and Public Health Engineering Minister Gautam Dev...

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After Land and Land Reforms Minister Abdur Rezzaq Mollah and Housing and Public Health Engineering Minister Gautam Dev,it was West Bengal Assembly Speaker Hasim Abdul Halim who put Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhjattacharjee on the dock,saying it was some of the wrong policies of the state government that had led to the Left Fronts rout in the recent elections.

Without naming the chief minister directly,the Speaker,who also happens to be a member of the CPI(M) State Committee,said on Thursday that boasting about the number of Left Front representatives in the 2006 Assembly elections was wrong. While the vote share achieved by the Marxists was 51 per cent,he pointed out,the vote share snagged by the Opposition was also a high 49 per cent.

You will have to remember that the margin was just 1 per cent and flaunting the fact that the Left Front snagged 235 seats in the assembly was wrong and foolish, the Speaker told The Indian Express. It was Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee who used to regularly announce at various rallies that the Left Front,with 235 MLAs,could bulldoze the Trinamool which had only 30 seats.

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The Chief minister used to say this particularly with reference to the agitation going on in 2008 against the Tata small car manufacturing factory then being set up at Singur. The Tata factory at Singur will definitely be set up. We are 235 and they are 30. We will do away with all Opposition, Bhattcahrjee had said at various rllies.

But this did not happen ultimately.

And both Gautam Dev and Abdur Rezzaq Mollah had criticised the Chief Minister for flaunting the numbers in public,saying that ignoring the Opposition had been absolutely wrong.

The Speaker also criticised the governments decision of acquiring land for the Tatas,saying that the government cannot act as a property dealer.

It is not the job of the government to find land for an industrial house. The Government is not a middleman. In Gujarat,the factory was set up on a plot of land which had been earmarked for setting up a university. Had it been farm land,there would have been immense resistance as we see everywhere including West Bengal, Halim said.