Police crackdown has been initiated swiftly and decisively on key leaders of the Paschim Banga Chhatra Samaj – the architect of the 27 August march to Nabanna in Howrah to protest the heinous rape and murder of a young doctor at Kolkata's RG Kar Hospital earlier this month.
The march, which aimed to confront Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee over her alleged inaction, resulted in widespread violence and damage to property. Two key conveners of the organisation (that seems to have sprouted overnight) are among the 30-plus alleged rioters booked by the police in the past 48 hours.
Sayan Lahiri and Subhankar Halder have been booked by the Kolkata Police under “attempt to murder” charges. FIRs have been lodged against them in Hastings and Maidan police stations.
Lahiri was picked up by policemen in mufti as soon as he came out of a vernacular audiovisual channel studio in central Kolkata on Tuesday night after a talk show. Halder, on the other hand, was picked up from a hideout in the city. Both were produced before the court on Wednesday and remanded to police custody for 14 days.
A top police official said that the leaders were also booked under sections relating to criminal conspiracy for organising unlawful assembly, assault on police personnel on duty, and damage to public property.
The top brass pointed out that as many as 37 police personnel were seriously injured in various assaults, and a senior traffic sergeant could lose an eye as a group of protesters pounced on him, pinned him down to the ground, and hit him with stones during the march.
The profusely bleeding police sergeant was immediately taken to a private eye hospital and the state government is arranging for his transfer to LV Prasad Eye Hospital in Hyderabad to try and save his eye.
Suvendu Adhikari of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the leader of the opposition in the West Bengal assembly, who had lent full support to the Chhatra Samaj programme right from the beginning (unlike other party leaders), complained that “atrocities had been committed” on peaceful protesters on the day of the march.
Adhikari once again reiterated his party’s full support to the arrested leaders. Taking Sayan Lahiri’s mother by his side on a television show yesterday, he said that the West Bengal BJP will bear the full cost of legal proceedings and provide the best legal support to those arrested. The party will ensure their release as early as possible, he promised.
While key Chhatra Samaj conveners were rounded up by the police in Kolkata, intelligence inputs provided by district police units resulted in the arrest of another half a dozen BJP leaders and activists, both on the day before the march and on the day itself.
The most dramatic of these was the arrest of four Chhatra Samaj leaders who were accused of spreading “fake narratives” on social media, inciting people to create law and order problems.
As soon as these four men were rounded up by the police in plainclothes, the family members and BJP leaders cried foul, stating that they were “missing.” The police immediately countered the allegations, clarifying that the so-called “missing” BJP men were actually in their custody for indulging in mischief on social media
Significantly, the 27 August march marked a sharp departure from the spontaneous protests seen in Kolkata by civil society, schools, colleges, doctors, authors, senior citizens, artists, singers, stage artists, and many more segments of the population, outraged by the shocking rape and murder of the doctor at RG Kar.
The Chhatra Samaj, evidently egged on by senior BJP leaders, tried to capitalise on the popular sentiments of outrage, and camouflaged the student body as a “non-political” platform. The real identity behind the façade got exposed sooner than later, as the media, the police, and other agitating outfits began to do background checks on the organisers once they appeared in public to appeal for the march.
It was revealed that Sayan Lahiri was a BJP karyakarta in the southern outskirts of Kolkata. In his college days, however, he was with the Trinamool Congress.
When the media confronted him with these antecedents, Lahiri defended himself saying that he may be associated with the BJP, but the Chhatra Samaj's call for the Nabanna march had no political banners. “Anybody wanting to join the march should come but keep their political flags down,” Lahiri had said.
Top police officials had earlier released video footage of Lahiri approaching a five-star hotel in Kolkata a day before the march, alleging that he had met a “prominent political figure” staying in the hotel. “We have all the inputs on who the political personality was,” said Suprotim Sarker, ADG (South Bengal), but refrained from disclosing the identity of the political figure.
Subhankar Halder, the other convener of Chhatra Samaj, was also a Youth Trinamool Congress leader from Nabadwip town. When challenged by the media for his alleged criminal antecedents, including one under the sections dealing with outraging the modesty of women, he retorted, “Under the Trinamool Congress regime in Bengal, any political adversary can be booked under fake criminal charges. I have 30 to 32 criminal cases against me and have served a jail term thrice.” He also claimed that he had joined the RSS and the ABVP in Nabadwip after his expulsion from the TMC in 2014.
However, with growing evidence of the Paschim Banga Chhatra Samaj’s political lineage and affiliations, other protesters, both political and apolitical, distanced themselves from the 27 August march. The Congress party, the Communists, the agitating doctors, and civil society at large, did not to join the Nabanna march.
The BJP supporting the march has halted the momentum of the protests that were gaining ascendancy in Kolkata and other districts after the horrifying crime at RG Kar. One has to wait and watch if the fire is doused or reignited in the coming days.
(The writer is a Kolkata-based senior journalist. This is an opinion piece, and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)
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