Kolkata: Taking on the CPI(M) in its bastion, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Monday accused it of looting central funds meant for the poor and said the days of the Marxists in West Bengal were numbered.
"There are two Bengals. One belongs to the CPI(M) where there is money and glitter and the other belongs to you and me where there is darkness and backwardness and where there is no prosperity, employment, roads and electricity," he said.
This was Gandhi's first public rally in the metropolis and the crowd applauded every time he attacked the CPI(M) in his brief but hard hitting speech. Assembly elections in the state due next year.
Alleging that the CPI(M) had been indulging in loot of central funds meant for the poor for the last 33 years, Gandhi said, "The Centre has been giving money worth crores of rupees to Bengal under NREGA and other schemes, but the money is being siphoned off by the CPI-M and not reaching the beneficiaries. The fund is going to the CPI(M) coffers."
"45 per cent of the people in West Bengal do not have even ration cards," he said adding CPI-M did not pay any heed to the needs of the common men, but worked for the benefit of the party. Referring to his visit to China, Gandhi said senior Communist leaders of the country raised questions about the functioning of the Marxists in Bengal.
"They wanted to know what happened to the Communists of Bengal. They are still clinging on to old thinking of the '70s and '80s when the world is going forward," he said.
Recalling that Soviet leaders had met his father Rajiv Gandhi when he was the Prime Minister, he said at that time Soviet Union was under Communist rule. Then one day he read in the papers that Communism had been wiped out from USSR overnight. "The day is not far off when the CPI(M) will be uprooted from the state," he said. PTI
