Today in Politics: PM Modi to campaign in Bengal amid Mamata vs BJP flare-up over attack on NIA team

With less than two weeks to go for the first phase of polling in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, the campaign of all the contenders are in full swing, despite soaring temperatures across the country.

The ruling BJP’s biggest draw, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, will be in North Bengal’s Jalpaiguri, campaigning for the incumbent party MP Jayanta Kumar Roy on Sunday.

Bengal education minister Bratya Basu alleged Saturday that the Election Commission (EC) had been silent on the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress (TMC) government’s request to accord permission to rebuild around 5,000 houses ravaged by the recent storm in Jalpaiguri, at the behest of the BJP.

“We feel the EC has not got clearance from the BJP so far in this regard,” Basu alleged, adding, “I hope some announcement will be made by the PM when he visits Jalpaiguri tomorrow. But I urge people not to fall prey to any promises made by him.”

Over in South Bengal, a two-member TMC delegation will visit Bhupatinagar in Purba Medinipur district, where a National Investigation Agency (NIA) team was attacked by a mob Saturday while arresting two conspirators in a 2022 blast case – a sequence of events that has been challenged by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, who accused the NIA officials of allegedly attacking the villagers at Bhupatinagar, rather than the other way round.

The TMC supremo also defended the villagers’ response as self-defence, charging that the NIA officials had entered several houses in the early hours over an incident involving the “bursting of crackers in 2022”.

On Sunday, TMC leader Kunal Ghosh, along with senior state minister Chandrima Bhattacharya, will visit the area to interact with the villagers, including the families of those arrested, and then