A day after the Delhi Police refuted charges of assault on the wife and the toddler son of a Bengali migrant worker — residing at Geeta Colony in the Capital — the Trinamool Congress on Wednesday got the alleged ‘victim’ family to lodge an FIR in a Kolkata police station.
“We are getting the family to lodge and FIR against the Delhi Police for the inhuman torture that they have perpetrated against these poor Bengali family,” senior TMC leader and spokesperson Kunal Ghosh said adding “the family has been extorted huge amount of money and they barely managed to return home leaving everything back there.”
Inside the TMC party office in Kolkata the mother of the ‘victim’ infant — flanked on two sides by senior Bengal minister Firhad Hakim and party spokesperson Ghosh — reeled off her alleged ‘woes’ saying how “two men and two women in uniform came two consecutive days first looking for my husband and then our Adhaar Card — which when showed they rejected to be genuine before branding us as Bangladeshis despite our continuous insistence that we come from Chanchol area of Malda district.”
She said “first day went back but on the second day they returned and took me to a nearby park and asked me to chant Jai Sri Ram which I told them I couldn’t as I was a Muslims, then they assaulted me and my child fell off my hands, she was hit in her head as I was slapped it hit her ears and it bled, then they took us to the police station where they got us to sign a number of papers and then extorted `25,000 from us along with two mobile phones which they have not returned. When we insisted that we were all Indians they told anyone who spoke Bengali was a Bangladeshi.”
The development comes at a time when the politics on Bengali Asmita was glowing red hot ahead of the next year’s Assembly elections.
Hakim said, “This is the sample of a double engine Government, wherever there is such Government they are harassing the Bengali people calling them Bangladeshis, I would like to advise the BJP to desist from breaking the society, already India has been sliced on the grounds of Islamic fundamentalism, but this time we will not let Indians be divided.”
Ghosh alleged that the Delhi Police were trying to disprove the allegations after “Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee made it public. We strongly condemn this. We will take legal action.”
Refuting the charges the Delhi Police officials earlier said that the CCTV footages showed the woman walking alone down the street with her children at the exact time when she was alleging harassment by the police.
Meanwhile, the State BJP strongly hit out at the TMC leadership for making it a political issue for reaping electoral dividends. “The TMC is up to enacting drama of all kinds to get votes when 40 lakh Bengali migrant workers are working outside Bengal. If they have courage then why they are not brining all they are not bringing all of them back home, they are playing politics with the Bangladeshis for winning elections with their votes which we will not allow to happen this time round.”
The BJP had earlier condemned the Chief Minister’s post on the X saying it was an attempt to iunstigate communal violence in the State.