Kolkata, June 27 (IANS) West Bengal unit of Congress, this year, will organise a protest on July 21 to counter Trinamool Congress’s annual Martyrs’ Day rally, which the latter holds every year to condemn the killing of 13 youth Congress workers on this date in 1993 during the erstwhile CPI(M)-led Left Front regime with nonagenarian Indian Marxist Late Jyoti Basu as the Chief Minister.

Observing the Martyrs’ Day on July 21 was initially a Congress affair till Mamata Banerjee formed the Trinamool Congress by breaking away from the Congress in 1998. Since then, observing the Martyrs’ Day in July became a Trinamool Congress-arranged affair.

However, with the Trinamool Congress having faced a landslide defeat in the recently concluded Assembly polls this year, the West Bengal Pradesh Congress Committee (WBPCC) has decided to organise a counter-rally on July 21.

However, the theme and demand of the counter-rally by the state Congress is a bit different. The demand is that the new state government under the leadership of the ninth Chief Minister, Suvendu Adhikari, should reopen the files investigating the role of the erstwhile West Bengal Home Secretary, Manish Gupta, behind the police firing on July 21, 1993.

According to the state Congress president in West Bengal, Suvankar Sarkar, the role of Manish Gupta, as then state home secretary, who later joined the Trinamool Congress and also became a power minister in the first Mamata Banerjee-led cabinet from 2011 to 2016, behind that police firing in 1993 was extremely crucial.

“At that time, the then Home Secretary of West Bengal, Manish Gupta, was holding an important position in the administration. The people of West Bengal have the right to know the course of events of that day, the administrative decisions and the real truth behind the firing. Therefore, in the interest of complete transparency and for the purpose of uncovering the truth, the ‘Manish Gupta file’ must be made public immediately,” Sarkar said.

Another state Congress leader said that there should also be an investigation into why the Mamata-Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress regime during its 15-year rule from 2011 to 2026 carefully avoided a thorough investigation revealing Manish Gupta’s role behind the police firing on July 21, 1993.

Manish Gupta contested as a Trinamool Congress candidate from Jadavpur Assembly constituency in South 24 Parganas district in 2011, which marked the end of the 34-year Left Front regime and the beginning of the Trinamool Congress.

In his electoral debut, Gupta turned out to be a giant-killer as he defeated the then West Bengal Chief Minister, Late Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, by a margin of over 16,000 votes. He served in the first Mamata Banerjee-led cabinet as the power minister from 2011 to 2016.

However, in 2016, he was defeated in Jadavpur by CPI(M)’s Sujan Chakraborty by a margin of over 14,000 votes. Thereafter, he was sent to the Rajya Sabha by the Trinamool Congress leadership.

–IANS

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