Seeking Home Minister P Chidambaram’s intervention in the matter, CPM leaders Sitaram Yechury and Basudeb Acharia accused Banerjee of “deliberately stoking panic and terror amongst the Muslim minority population claiming that she has secret information that a section of the police will help the Left Front in unleashing communal violence in the state”.

In a letter to Chidambaram, they said if Banerjee genuinely possessed such “secret information”, then the Home Ministry should “obtain it and act on it in consultation with the state government”.

“If on the contrary, there is no such information, as surely is the case, then may we request you to set at rest the apprehensions and tensions that have resulted from the Union minister’s utterances,” the senior CPM leaders, who met Chidambaram, said.

They drew Chidambaram’s attention to “a serious situation that is developing in the course of the current election campaign to municipal corporations” in West Bengal and sought his intervention.

Maintaining that 30 years of Left Front rule was marked by “unprecedented communal harmony and fraternity”, they said any effort to blemish this record would not be in the interests of national unity and integrity.

“Further, casting such wild and unsubstantiated allegations, especially by a Union cabinet minister, also violates the provisions of the Representation of People Act, 1951,” Yechury and Acharia said.