Several people killed during election-related violence in India

Voters are currently casting their ballots in a fierce contest to elect municipal leaders. (Photo/AFP)

At least seven people have been killed and dozens more injured in India after clashes over local polls in West Bengal, a state notorious for political violence during election campaigns.

"Seven people have been killed and dozens wounded in poll-related violence in different villages across the state," Jawed Shamim, a senior officer in West Bengal's police force, told AFP news agency on Saturday.

Another police official, requesting anonymity as they were not authorised to speak to the media, said five of the dead were from the state's ruling Trinamool Congress party.

The other two were affiliated with India's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and West Bengal's Communist Party of India.

Voters are currently casting their ballots in a fierce contest to elect municipal leaders, with more than 200,000 candidates across the state of 104 million people.

The BJP has in recent years worked hard to gain a toehold in West Bengal — ruled by a communist party for much of its history — to expand its reach beyond its Hindi-speaking northern heartlands.

Decades of violence

West Bengal has been ruled by Trinamool leader Mamata Banerjee since 2011, when her party defeated the Communist-led administration that had ruled the state for the prior three decades.

Banerjee, a fierce critic of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has accused his Hindu-nationalist BJP of attempting to import divisive sectarian politics into the state, which has a large Muslim minority.

Modi has in turn accused her administration of endemic corruption.

But the roots of political violence in the state stretch back decades, with police recording thousands of murders around election time since the 1960s.

During state polls in 2021 — won emphatically by Trinamool but with a strong BJP showing — several activists from both parties were shot or hacked to death, their bodies sometimes hung from trees as an intimidation tactic.

Source: TRT