Kolkata, July 3 (IANS) Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari, while speaking at the inauguration of a two-day orientation programme for the newly-elected legislators in the West Bengal Assembly at Kolkata on Friday, assured bigger democratic space for the opposition legislators, which, according to him, was absent during the previous Trinamool Congress regime in the state.

“First, during the 34-year Left Front regime from 1977 to 2011, everything operated from the party office of the ruling dispensation. And the least said is better about what happened in the last 15 years, from 2011 to 2026. It is not fair to say bad things about the state. But in the previous regime, there was no respect for the opposition MLAs. The block development officers and officer-in-charge of police stations even refused to attend the telephone calls of the opposition MLAs. In any public programme, only the ruling party MLAs were invited. I was the leader of the opposition for five years. I was not invited to a single programme,” the Chief Minister said.

However, he said, in the first two months of his tenure as the new and ninth Chief Minister of West Bengal, he had tried to change the previous system of squeezing the democratic space of opposition MLAs.

“Now the situation has changed. The people have changed. In the last one and a half months, I have held five administrative meetings, where both the ruling and the opposition MLAs were invited. I have also involved the opposition in the budget process. This is because I believe that we will have to develop the state together,” the Chief Minister said.

Speaking on the occasion, the Chief Minister criticised both the Left Front and Trinamool Congress regimes for following the archaic system of running the Assembly proceedings and refraining from adopting modern communication techniques.

“There is a need to increase the popularity of our MLAs, ruling or opposition. Voting is still done on paper here. There is no electronic system. The infrastructure of the Assembly needs to be fixed. That is necessary for the sake of the welfare of the people. We need to work with the people and not the party. West Bengal will lead the country again. Let us hope so and work for that,” he said.

–IANS

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