Calcutta High Court granted temporary relief to the CPM’s Jadavpur book stall, but it came after a 12-hour-long battle between Left protesters and police from Saturday evening to Sunday morning.
Hours after CPM supporters forced an excavator, which was brought by a joint team of police and Kolkata Municipal Corporation to demolish the party’s book stalls in Jadavpur late on Saturday evening, to retreat, police and central forces personnel arrived in greater numbers to raze the structure.
However, the effort was resisted by Left supporters, who were led by CPM leaders Sudip Sengupta and Srijan Bhattacharya, till 5am on Sunday. The police tried several times to demolish the stall throughout the night but had to step back in the face of resistance and sloganeering.
However, the police managed to dismantle a stall of the SUCI and one of the rights group APDR.
“The cops came to fulfil the anti-Left agenda of the RSS-BJP without any legal sanction. We asked them to show an order, but they failed to do so. We challenged the police to demolish the BJP stall first before touching ours. Left supporters were united in their action to resist the cops. They lathicharged our supporters but could not break the resistance. They left at 5am,” CPM leader Sengupta said.
The CPM moved the high court on Sunday against the action of the police and the KMC. The CPM said the court had granted the party temporary relief by agreeing to hear the case on October 20.
A senior high court lawyer said that the case has been listed as a “pending matter”, which in legal terms implies a status quo situation. The lawyer has claimed it is a relief for the CPM because cops would not be able to demolish the stall.
“There is good news. Our Jadavpur book stall will stay. I congratulate book lovers for their fight,” Srijan said in a Facebook post after the court agreed to hear their case.
A CPM leader said the police had informally told them that there would be no new effort to demolish the stall. However, in the past 24 hours, several stalls were vandalised in Burdwan, North 24-Parganas and in a few other districts, allegedly by supporters of the BJP and RSS outfits.
Five injured
Five CPM supporters were injured in an attack by alleged BJP men on a Left book stall in Barasat on Sunday.
CPM leader Palash Das wrote in a Facebook post: “BJP attacked the CPM book stall at Barasat Nabapalli Bhadrabari More. Five CPM supporters have been seriously injured in the assault. The injured have been admitted to a hospital in Barasat.”
Malda row
The CPM has alleged that the party was forced to close a bookstall selling Marxist literature because of threats from Bajrang Dal activists at Chanchal in Malda district on Saturday evening.
The CPM had opened the stall near a Durga Puja pandal at Netaji Crossing in Chanchal.
“Like previous years, our workers opened the bookstall at Netaji Crossing. Before setting it up, we submitted a written intimation to Chanchal police station and obtained a receipt. However, shortly after the stall began operating, some Bajrang Dal activists gathered nearby, shouting ‘Jai Shri Ram’, and demanded that we close it. When our workers refused to heed the diktat, they began flexing their muscles. Police reached the spot, but we had to close the stall then,” Animesh Sinha, a district secretariat member of CPM, said.
The protesters, however, claimed that the CPM workers had shown disrespect towards Hinduism and Durga.
“When we asked them to put up pictures of Goddess Durga at their stall, they refused. Our protest was not unreasonable. They want to sell Marxist books during Durga Puja but feel ashamed to keep an image of the goddess at their stall. This is offensive,” a Bajrang Dal activist said.
In Malda town, CPM workers were seen selling books near the statue of Syama Prasad Mookerjee in protest against the relocation of the party’s bookstall to a less prominent location.
Suvojit Mitra, secretary of the CPM’s English Bazar area committee, said: “The locations where we traditionally set up temporary bookstalls during the Puja were allotted to a few other organisations believed to be close to the BJP,” Mitra said.
Amlan Bhaduri, the Englishbazar MLA and chairman of the local civic body, said the CPM had been allowed to set up its stall nearby. “We are democratic, and we allowed the CPM to open a stall just a few yards away from the location where it had set up its counter last year. The CPM must remember that the location is not its ancestral property,” Bhaduri said.
Additional reporting by Tapas Ghosh in Calcutta