The West Bengal Assembly Speaker has complained against Governor Jagdeep Dhankhar to his Lok Sabha counterpart Om Birla, PTI reported on Wednesday. During the virtual All India Speakers’ Conference on Tuesday, Biman Banerjee told Birla about Dhankhar’s “excessive interference”.
“I told the Lok Sabha Speaker about the excessive interference of Governor Jagdeep Dhankhar in parliamentary democracy and the functioning of the Assembly,” said Banerjee. “Despite being passed by the Assembly, several bills are lying with the governor as he has not signed them. This is unprecedented in the history of West Bengal’s parliamentary democracy. Such a thing has never happened before.”
The ruling Trinamool Congress supported the West Bengal Speaker. “We have been saying this for a long time that the present governor is acting as the mouthpiece of a specific political party,” said TMC leader and MLA Tapas Roy. “He is not only interfering in the functioning of the state of affairs but is also maligning the West Bengal government.”
Dhankhar is yet to react to the development. However, the Bharatiya Janata Party claimed that the governor has exposed the truth. “The TMC is angry with the governor as he has exposed the lawless situation in the state,” BJP state chief Dilip Ghosh said. “There have been complaints against him earlier, but all of them were baseless.”
The TMC government and Dhankhar have been at loggerheads since 2019. The latest altercation between the two was last week when they traded barbs over the post-poll violence in the state.
On June 16, the West Bengal governor tweeted a letter that he wrote to Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, in which he accused her of being silent about the violence after Assembly elections in the state. The state government heavily criticised Dhankhar for making the letter public, and claimed that its content was fabricated.
Apart from the state government, Left parties have also criticised Dhankar for acting like a BJP mouthpiece. “He is not a man of the BJP but his function is tantamount to be a man of BJP,” Biman Bose, the Left Front chairperson, had said. “This cannot be the role of a governor. He is identifying himself as a man of BJP. This is not right. This cannot be the role of a governor, particularly in West Bengal.”
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