A week after a communally charged mob went on the rampage burning down three dozen vehicles, torching a police station and damaging properties belonging to another community at Sujapur-laliachak village in border district of Malda, Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Saturday went on a denial mode saying what happened last Sunday was not a communal violence but one of those regular clashes between the local people and the BSF.
“There are some people who are trying to reap political benefit from a clash between the BSF and the local people which is a regular affair” Banerjee said insisting what happened on Sunday was “not a communal violence at all.”
In what the Opposition promptly called a “shameless attempt by the Government to bury its head in the sand against an approaching storm” Banerjee said “it is completely misreported and misinformed. There the issue was between the BSF and people and nothing else. So it is not a communal issue.”
Curiously the Chief Minister’s statement stood diametrically opposite to what some senior police officers told the media soon after the violence. According to a senior officer a huge crowd of about a lakh people belonging to a particular community had amassed in the area protesting and raising slogans against an earlier statement made by Kamlesh Tewari a Hindutva leader in UP.
“It was a pre-planned affair with communal motive,” he had said. The armed mob went berserk torched buses, a BSF vehicle and a police station and blockaded the National Highway 34 for hours on end disrupting connection not only between South and North Bengal but also between Bengal and parts of Northeastern Bihar.
Meanwhile 8 Bangladeshi nationals were on Saturday arrested by the BSF for sneaking into India without legitimate papers.
Elsewhere in Bidhannagar in North 24 Parganas members of NIA visited the Bidhannagar Police Station to interrogate the arrested Bangladeshi persons who were carrying several fake passports some of which bore Pathankot and Jalandhar addresses. The NIA was trying to establish whether these people were connected to Hijbul Mujahideen Bangladesh or not.