BJP leads from Mamata’s anti-land acqusition launch pad

PTI, May 23, 2019, 1:42 PM IST

Kolkata: BJP candidate Locket Chatterjee is leading from Hooghly constituency, where TMC supremo Mamata Banerjee launched her anti-land acquisition agitation in Singur, which catapulted her into the national spotlight.

Chatterjee was leading by over 64,000 votes overTrinamool Congress candidate Ratna De, according to the latest Election Commission trends. In 2014, De had won the seat by 1,89,084 votes.

Ten years ago, Tata Motors had built a factory for the world’s cheapest car, Nano, at Singur, but the project was abandoned and shifted to Gujarat following a massive agitation by the farmers, led by Banerjee and her party. The project was moved to the western state on the invitation of the then chief minister Narendra Modi.

In 2016, the Supreme Court had quashed the Left Front-led West Bengal government’s acquisition of 997 acres of agricultural land by Tata Motors’ and ordered its return to 9,117 farmers.

Though Banerjee-led TMC government, which came to power in 2011, returned the land to the farmers in November 2016, three years later only 30 per cent of the land could be made cultivable as the plots on which the concrete structures had come up remained barren.

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