Even as the Hindu-Muslim rhetoric threatened to take a demonic proportion ahead of the coming festival season, Bengal Opposition leader Suvendu Adhikari on Wednesday demanded imposition of President’s rule in the State.

This, after his cavalcade was blockaded away and his car was allegedly hit with sticks by slogan- shouting Trinamool Congress workers at Baruipur in South 24 Parganas where he had gone to take part in a preannounced rally against alleged deprivation of Hindus. In what the critics saw a “too apparent and too clear” an attempt to polarise the State’s communal ecology with a specific political agenda ahead of the next year’s Assembly elections the Opposition Leader said “let the Election Commission of India decide after today’s rumpus created by the hostile, anti-Sanatani goons of the Trinamool Congress whether it is possible to a peaceful election in Bengal without the President’s Rule being imposed, today’s attack on the BJP workers in presence of the State Police only proves that there is no atmosphere to hold elections without President’s Rule. So we demand it to be imposed in Bengal. We unequivocally demand President’s Rule.”

Earlier, the BJP was scheduled to organise a long march at Baruipur a district town skirting the southern suburbs of Kolkata. “We had a police permission to hold the rally but the district SP played a TMC’s stooge and allowed the TMC men to assemble on two sides of the road and raise filthy slogans and attack our men, they rained lathi blows on my vehicle and had I been walking I would get a broken head, the police did it intentionally to harass the BJP, but we will not spare them and will return on March 27 and gherao the SP office,” he said. Incidentally Union Home Minister is scheduled to visit Kolkata on March 27.

All the State BJP MLAs led by Adhikari had gone to Baruipur to take part in a rally reportedly to express solidarity with the local Sanatani population who they complained were living in a climate of threat.

“The religious places are being desecrated and when we try to raise this in the Assembly we are not allowed to speak. Our MLAs are suspended by Speaker Biman Banerjee who is also an MLA from this area. This cannot go on for too long and so we had come here to protest against what has been happening here but the TMC goons with the help of the police attacked us,” party leader and MLA Agni Mitra Paul said. The communal atmosphere of the State had been hotting up for the past fortnight with Adhikari saying that when his party would come to power in Bengal after next year’s Assembly elections it would throw out all the Muslim MLAs from the Assembly.