The Chiriamore area on BT Road in Barrackpore in North 24 Parganas looked like a war zone on Monday afternoon after BJP workers clashed with police and got involved in a high-pitched street fight. The clashes lasted for about a good 30 minutes and left several BJP workers, including women workers, injured and admitted in hospital.

The violence spiraled out of control after a BJP ‘law violation’ rally, led by the party’s state president Sukanta Majumdar, attempted to march towards the Barrackpore Police Commissionerate and lay siege to the premises in protest against the alleged deterioration in law and order in the region in the recent past.

Police opened lathi-charge and tear gassed the protestors, eventually managing to disperse the mob which had reached threateningly close to the commissionerate building. Water cannons were also used on protestors to deter them from moving any further.

The police, on its part, were allegedly at the receiving end of rampant brick batting from the BJP workers who retaliated against the use of water cannons and tear gas on the advancing party supporters. The police, too, were seen throwing those bricks back as missiles on the political crowd leading to utter chaos and pandemonium.

A large number of BJP workers, including women, were arrested.

The mayhem started after the BJP workers, advancing in sizable numbers, broke down two of the four barricades put up by the police on BT Road ahead of the commissionerate and deployed water cannon jets on the advancing crowd towards the third barricade. The police were immediately brick batted which further led to police opening lathi charge and bursting tear gas shells.

The BJP alleged that even women workers were mercilessly beaten up by men in uniform and at least one woman worker had her leg broken from police beating.

Majumdar denied his party workers attacking the police with bricks and stones and alleged that it was the police, instead, who hurled bricks at the BJP workers. “We are not Sheikh Shahajahan. We were not on the streets to target the police. We breached the barricades because we wanted to submit a memorandum to the Barrackpore police commissioner on the collapse of law and order in his area,” Majumdar said.

“We will file an FIR against the CP, as an individual and not as the chief of local police for his actions today. We will move through our legal cell and our advocates. We will also move the national women’s commission because we have the footage of police torture, especially on our women workers,” he added.

Majumdar was heard demanding immediate release of the arrested workers and threatened the police that he would start a civil movement at the site unless obliged. The BJP leader later began a sit-in dharna at the site and visited some of the injured in hospital.

While Launching an audio-visual campaign against the Trinamul later in the day, the state’s leader of opposition Suvendu Adhikari, said the party would “see till the end” in its effort to punish errant police personnel.

Senior officers at the site of clash, however, maintained that the police went by the book to bring the mob under control and refused to entertain Majumdar’s demands. “You can take any legal steps against me. We have enough proof of how your workers tried to take law in their hands,” a senior officer was heard telling Majumdar.

“The police would have opened fire on protestors if this was the Left Front era or would have shown little mercy to law breakers if it were a BJP-ruled state,” Kunal Ghosh, Trinamul spokesperson, said. “Police did whatever was necessary to disperse a mob which was quickly out of control. There were hardly any excesses committed,” he maintained.