Buddha speaks but party won't burn fingers

- Former CM asks government to get to the bottom of fire at AMRI

OUR BUREAU

Bhattacharjee at the rally. Picture by Pranab Debnath

Dec. 18: Former chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee today asked the government to get to the bottom of the AMRI fire tragedy, a seemingly unexceptional response that stood out because of the silence of his party and the late Jyoti Basu's association with the moving force behind the hospital project.

"The other day a big fire broke out at a nursing home in Calcutta. But what is the government doing? Kaar gafilotitey eto boro agun laglo, keno agun laglo, ei sob khunje baar kortey hobey (whose negligence led to the fire, why the fire broke out, all this will have to be found out)," Bhattacharjee told a CPM rally in Nadia's Krishnagar today.

Bhattacharjee's comments come at a time when the CPM has been treading with caution on the fire at AMRI Hospitals, Dhakuria, which was set up on land given on highly favourable terms by the then Jyoti Basu government.

On December 9, the day of the tragedy in which at least 90 people died, Surjya Kanta Mishra, the current leader of the Opposition and the health minister in the Left government, had reacted with extreme restraint.

"This is not the time to conduct a post-mortem of the incident. The government is taking appropriate steps and will conduct an inquiry. Action will be taken against the guilty according to law," Mishra had said.

Tonight, Mishra stuck to the same line. The Opposition leader said he would not utter a single word about the AMRI fire as a judicial probe had been ordered. "We should not make any comment on the AMRI fire because a judicial commission has been formed to probe the matter," he said.

S.K. Todi, an AMRI director who is said to have run the show at the Dhakuria unit and is now in police custody, had the backing of then chief minister Jyoti Basu when the project was conceived. However, after Bhattacharjee became chief minister in November 2000, the Left government began to distance itself from Todi.

CPM sources said Mishra had reserved his comment as the leader of the Opposition is accountable to the Assembly, particularly when it is in session.

Bhattacharjee, who is no longer an MLA, is not tied down by any such constraints, the CPM sources said.

However, they hastened to add that the former chief minister's intention was "not to hold the state government responsible for the AMRI fire as it was a private health facility and the administration had nothing to be defensive about it".

The source conceded that Bhattacharjee's comment had the potential to swivel the spotlight on the party's erstwhile proximity to one of the key promoters. "Buddhada only wanted a fair inquiry so that the guilty are punished, knowing well that a section of the AMRI authorities were close to some party leaders," the CPM source added.

Bhattacharjee also referred to the 170 hooch deaths in South 24-Parganas but the statement on AMRI preceded it. He condemned the alleged slow response by the administration to the hooch fallout, saying more lives could have been saved.

The former chief minister mentioned his one-time pet theme that eventually became a hot potato in Bengal: industrialisation.

"Trinamul has been talking big about bringing new industries to Bengal. But the fact remains that the state has not got any new industry after the Salboni steel plant, which was finalised during the Left Front government's tenure," Bhattacharjee said. "The entrepreneurs are reluctant to come to Bengal because they understand that they will not get land to set up their projects."

He criticised the new government's law-and-order record. "The law-and-order situation has worsened in the state…. The anti-socials are feeling happy as they suddenly feel that their government has come to power in the state," Bhattacharjee said.