Calcutta, Oct. 21: Mamata Banerjee today declared her party would call bandhs only in an “emergency” since they cause “immense inconvenience to people”.

Her sudden change of heart — after calling three Bengal bandhs in the past two years and blocking Durgapur Expressway for over a fortnight — was prompted by the need to woo back young and urban voters, Trinamul Congress leaders said.

“Charity begins at home. We have told our party leaders in the districts that bandhs and blockades on trivial issues will not be tolerated,” Mamata told reporters at her home in Kalighat.

“If they are to be called at all in an emergency, our district leaders must seek permission from the high command. Bandhs and blockades cause immense inconvenience to people…. We should consider a bandh a last resort to press our demands.”

The Trinamul chief added that the same principle applied to rasta roko and rail roko programmes.

Asked what had prompted the decision, Mamata referred to the global credit crisis. “At this juncture, when the world is passing through a financial crisis, bandhs and blockades should be discouraged.”

Several Trinamul leaders, however, put the move down to political motives.

“Mamata has got into election mode and wants to win back the urban voters she has alienated by driving the Nano project out of Bengal,” a senior leader said. “After all, her vote bank has essentially been based in urban areas.”

The Lok Sabha polls are due early next year and elections to four civic bodies are slated for November 30.

A Trinamul leader said that during the Puja, Mamata had gone pandal-hopping and interacted with many people. “The feedback she got on her politics of disruption, especially on driving the Tatas out, was extremely negative.”

“We must send a message across the state before the polls that we are against disruptive street politics,” an aide quoted Mamata as saying at a recent meeting.

This was one reason she had insisted there was to be no law violation during yesterday’s march to Lalbazar, party sources said.

A Trinamul leader said Ratan Tata’s open letter asking Bengal’s youth if they preferred jobs or lawlessness had helped change Mamata’s mind. So had negative feedback from Trinamul leaders in party-controlled South 24-Parganas and East Midnapore.

Mamata’s statement was in perfect sync with what arch-adversary Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee said today about the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha’s street politics in Darjeeling.

The chief minister said the Morcha’s agitation had harmed the local economy and described the forced change of car number plates, defacement of government offices and the dress-code diktat as a threat to the rule of law.

There was a second parallel too: Trinamul was enforcing a 24-hour shutdown in Cooch Behar’s Tufanganj even as Mamata was speaking against bandhs in Calcutta, and Bhattacharjee’s party has called a 12-hour bandh in the same subdivision tomorrow.

The Trinamul bandh, which came in protest against alleged police firing on supporters, led to several clashes, with a Trinamul panchayat samiti sabhapati hurling her slipper at a CPM MLA. That set up tomorrow’s CPM bandh.