CPM minister supports hawkers eviction

Leaning heavily on the anti-eviction forces both within the Trinamool Congress and the Left Front, CPI(M) leader and State Transport Minister Subhas Chakraborty said: “I still feel the roads should be left for vehicles and footpaths to the pedestrians. The encroached roads and footpaths have been giving Calcutta a bad name; I had tried to free them from hawkers.”

Taking a dig at his partymen who opposed it during the much controversial Operation Sunshine in November 1996, Chakraborty said: “If we want Calcutta to look clean and good, we have to put an end to a messy arrangement we all agreed on in the ’60s.”

“My attitude didn’t change since Operation Sunshine was launched,” Chakraborty said, adding that “if Subrata Mukherjee wants, he can count on my support.”

Incidentally, Chakraborty, the architect of the move, was severely criticised within the party and the Left Front and could finally come out unscathed virtually as he had had Chief Minister Jyoti Basu’s blessings for the operation to clean up Calcutta.

Giving vent to his anger as Operation Sunshine faded out with the passage of time, Chakraborty today sided with the Mayor who had to stop the eviction process after Trinamool Congress leader Mamata Banerjee asked him to postpone it.

“There is a strange combination of forces,” Chakraborty said, referring to sections of the Trinamool Congress and the CPI(M) which opposed Subrata Mukherjee’s move again.

“We have spent about Rs 12 crore for a rehabilitation package for the hawkers, but none agreed to enter the complexes we built for them and we have wasted our resources,” Chakraborty said, adding: “Vested political interest allowed the hawkers to waste such a huge amount of money.”