Even as the Bengal Government allegedly refused the Centre’s offer to send in more Central forces, the communal violence in North 24 Parganas district claimed its first casualty on Thursday.
The political ramifications of the ongoing violence reached the shores of Kolkata where Trinamool Congress and BJP workers ran into each other after senior BJP leader Kailash Vijayvargiya and the party’s State president Dilip Ghosh reached the RG Kar Medical College and Hospital where the riot victim, an alleged saffron activist, succumbed to his injuries.
Kartik Ghosh, the alleged BJP worker who died on Thursday, was attacked with sharp weapons by the rioters on Wednesday night while returning to his house in Basirhat, some 50 miles north of the State capital.
Hundreds of ruling TMC supporters blocked the BJP leaders’ passage to the hospital.
A politically charged-up crowd raised anti-BJP slogans and pounded Ghosh’s SUV, while another group smashed the windscreen of State BJP leader locket Chatterjee’s car, even as the police looked the other way.
With tension running high, the BJP leaders returned without meeting the victim’s relatives.
In the light of the fresh violence, the BJP has decided to send a team of its senior leaders to visit Basirhat to take stock of the situation and find out what led to the violence in Basirhat. The team, comprising lok Sabha members Meenakshi lekhi and Satya Pal Singh, would be led by the BJP’s vice-president and Rajya Sabha member OP Mathur. They would be leaving for the State in a few days.
Vijayvargiya and Ghosh would “coordinate” the team’s visit in the State.
Communal clashes had broken out in Basirhat, Baduria, Berachampa, Swaroop Nagar and other remote villages since Sunday night following a Facebook post by a Class XI boy who was quickly arrested by the police.
Meanwhile in Basirhat, its three lakh residents spent the fourth sleepless night on Thursday listening to blazing guns and raining bombs from all sides, in all colonies.
While Baduria limped back to normalcy with markets opening for the first day since Sunday, “not a single hour passed without a gunshot being heard or a bomb booming,” Ramen Bachhar, a local at Suryakanto Park near Rabindra Bhavan said over telephone, even as guns boomed in the background.
While no arrest barring the person who had posted the offensive comment has been made, the goons went on a night-long rampage through the town forcing the residents, mostly middle class, to come out on the streets and confront the police force on Thursday morning.
“The police were sitting tight doing nothing as there was a clear order from the local MlA not to touch the culprits,” angry residents complained. “We have no differences here among the Hindus and the Muslims. It is the Trinamool leaders who create tension every time to garner votes,” Pratima Biswas, a resident of Station Road said moments after a skirmish ensued between the security forces and the locals who hurled brickbats at the cops to express their anger.
Meanwhile, the Bengal Government allegedly refused the Centre’s offer to send in another four companies of Central forces, sources said.
“Already four companies of the BSF are patrolling the area. There was no need for more forces so the offer was declined,” a senior official in Kolkata said. A senior district-level officer in Barasat, the district headquarters, however, blamed the ruling party for “pulling us from behind and not allowing us to take action.”
The official, who was in the same district in 2009 during the Deganga riots said, “We had taken appropriate action as the police were given a free hand which was why the people of Deganga this time refused to be dragged into the riot. Rather they chased away the rioters who came in trucks from neighbouring Baduria.”
Along with escalation of violence, the war of words between the TMC and the BJP also continued to flare-up in the State.
As State Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee attacked the State Governor KN Tripathi and accused him of “insulting” her, Vijayvargiya said in Kolkata that the West Bengal Government had “stooped to a new low.”
Vijayvargiya said, “KN Tripathi is a seasoned politician. He was Speaker of the Uttar Pradesh Assembly. He is well aware of the Constitution and its norms. The Trinamool Congress is verbally attacking the Governor and trying to malign his office in order to divert attention from the communal violence and its failure to control the situation. In doing so, it has stooped to a new low.”
“The TMC Government, just for the sake of vote bank politics, allowed the incident to happen. In order to appease the minority, the majority community was made to suffer. Had the police taken action on the very first day, things would not have snowballed into such a situation. The police remained a mute spectator,” he charged.
State Food Supplies Minister and TMC president of North 24 Parganas district, Jyotipriyo Mullick, refuted the allegations and accused the BJP and other “Hindu groups” of “fomenting trouble” in the area.