Date:30/08/2008 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2008/08/30/stories/2008083056531200.htm

National

Our agitation is peaceful: Mamata

Raktima Bose

SINGUR: “We have not threatened employees at the Tata small car factory site or asked them to stop coming to work,” Trinamool Congress leader Mamata Banerjee said here on Friday.

All allegations of her party’s supporters being violent with the employees were false, she said.

Ms. Banerjee was addressing supporters outside the project site from where she has been supervising the agitation demanding the return of 400 acres she claims was forcibly acquired for the project. “It is our fundamental right to hold protests and lead movements against injustice. We have been leading a peaceful movement for the last six days,” she said. The government was spreading rumours and hatching conspiracies against her. She urged her supporters not to pay heed to them.

The Trinamool had called for an hour’s road blockade across the State on Friday. “We are not against industrialisation and want both the Tata Motors plant and agriculture to coexist in Singur,” Ms. Banerjee said. “But the plant should come up only on 600 acres… We will continue our peaceful movement till death if the State government does not concede our demand.”

Hundreds of trucks remained stranded on the Durgapur expressway. Ms. Banerjee said her party was not responsible for the “artificial blockades” police were creating “on the directions of the government to defame our peaceful movement.”