Two persons have been arrested for allegedly threatening and heckling two CISF job aspirants from Bihar in West Bengal's Siliguri, police said on Friday.
The incident triggered a political storm, with NDA leaders in Bihar denouncing the incident and demanding immediate action, and the TMC asserting that West Bengal believes in democratic rights of every citizen of the country and will never allow harassment of anyone.
Two persons, identified as Rajat Bhattacharya and Giridhari Roy, were arrested on Thursday night on the charge of harassment, intimidation and assault on two persons from Bihar, an official of the Siliguri Police Commissionerate said.
The two arrested persons are residents of Siliguri and are linked to a regional outfit, he said, adding further investigation is underway.
A purported video of the incident showed two youths from Bihar being heckled by a group of people, who asked the aspirants to produce their documents. They accused the duo of trying to get jobs in central forces by producing fake domicile certificates of West Bengal, thereby depriving people born and living in the state.
As the video went viral on social media on Thursday, NDA leaders from Bihar criticised West Bengal Chief Minister and Trinamool Congress supremo Mamata Banerjee over the incident.
Bihar Additional Director General of Police (Law and Order) Sanjay Singh also wrote a letter to his West Bengal counterpart requesting adequate security for the students seen in the viral video. Singh also urged the West Bengal Police to provide an update on the inquiry into the matter.
Union ministers Giriraj Singh and Chirag Paswan were among those who condemned the incident and wondered whether the candidates were not Indians and whether it was a crime to appear for an examination in West Bengal.
Faced with the outrage in Bihar, the TMC asserted that candidates from other states have always been welcome and if there was a "stray local incident", the party will look into it.
TMC leader Kunal Ghosh said that West Bengal believes in democratic rights of every citizen of the country and will never allow harassment of anyone.
"Our government welcomes everyone. There is nothing like that (harassment of prospective candidates), there should not be any such thing for any Indian," the former Rajya Sabha MP said.
Ghosh said that though there have been reports of migrant labourers from West Bengal facing harassment and even being lynched in BJP-ruled states, neither the TMC nor the state government ever played up the issue apart from lodging protests as "we believe India belongs to every citizen who can go anywhere in the country".
Claiming that the two youths were in possession of fake domicile certificates, Garga Chatterjee, general secretary of Bangla Pokkho, an outfit advocating for Bengali identity, alleged in a video message that a racket has been at work for the past three years to issue fake domicile certificates of West Bengal to youths from outside the state, thus depriving bonafide residents to apply for jobs in central forces like BSF, CRPF and CISF.
Stating that the incident took place in Siliguri on Wednesday, Chatterjee claimed that those locals who went to verify the documents of the youths did not heckle them and only asked them to show their documents but the youths continued to argue.
Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by The Telegraph Online staff and has been published from a syndicated feed.
