A child gazes from a bus caught in a traffic jam near Shahid Minar on Saturday. Picture by Pradip Sanyal

Calcutta, Dec. 3: Congress workers will march to Writers’ Buildings in the first week of February as part of a campaign against the ruling CPM in the run-up to next year’s Assembly elections, defence minister and state Congress president Pranab Mukherjee said today.

The march will be preceded by a string of demonstrations, including an agitation in front of the offices of district magistrates and subdivisional officers and police stations across Bengal in December and January.

Mukherjee was addressing a rally near Shahid Minar in protest against the arrest of Adhir Chowdhury, the party MP from Behrampore, in a double murder case.

Besides Mukherjee, information and broadcasting minister Priya Ranjan Das Munshi, former state Congress chief Somen Mitra and working president Pradip Bhattacharya were among those present at the rally.

But the presence of senior Congress leaders could not hide the rift within the party. Legislature party leader Atish Sinha was conspicuous by his absence.

He has defied the party whip by staying away from the agitation against Adhir’s arrest because of his strained relations with the MP.

Irked by Sinha’s absence from party-sponsored programmes, several Congress MLAs, including Shankar Singh and Abdul Mannan, had demanded his expulsion from the party at the executive committee meeting held at the Congress headquarters on November 27.

Bowing to pressure, Mukherjee announced that action would be taken against Sinha. But he chose to keep quiet on the issue today and instead dwelt at length on the manner in which Chowdhury was made a “victim of political conspiracy” by the CPM.

“The murder in which Adhir was involved took place in 1980. So why did the police not arrest him earlier?” he asked. “Adhir is a party MP and has been all along present in Behrampore. Why have the police arrested our MP just before the Assembly polls?’’

He said: “The Congress is an all-India party that has ruled independent India for most of the period (since Independence). But the 85-year-old CPM did not expand beyond Bengal, Kerala and Tripura. The CPM talks tall but does not have the strength to nominate even 100 candidates for the parliamentary election.”

Somen Mitra, who also stayed away from earlier protests on the Adhir issue, today called upon party workers to launch a movement against the CPM.