The murky incident of the murder of 30-year-old Mrityunjay Barman in Kaliagunj, Uttar Dinajpur, just got murkier with Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee obliquely pointing fingers at the BSF during her administrative meeting at Malda on Thursday.
“Who fired on the victim? I am told that the particular village in question is under BSF’s control. Is that a fact? Does the police and district administration have any information about it? Is that village under BSF supervision?” Banerjee said while talking about law and order conditions in the region.
Banerjee kept training her guns on the central paramilitary force guarding international borders. “I hear they are taking advantage of their 50 km penetration sanction and torturing villagers in bordering areas. Many have died. Does the BSF supervise that village? I think there must be an inquiry on where the bullet came from and who fired the shot,” the chief minister directed senior police personnel, including state DGP Manoj Malaviya, who were present at the meeting.
Upon being informed by an official that the village concerned is indeed at the border, Banerjee sounded irked. “That means I have information that you don’t. You are armed with the law. All you need to do is implement the law effectively,” she told the police officers in attendance.
Barman was shot dead in the wee hours on April 27 right outside his house at Chandgaon village adjacent to the Bangladesh border in the Radhikapur gram panchayat in Kaliagunj after a team of state police personnel conducted a raid in search of Bishnu Barman, a BJP panchayat samiti member.
The victim, a construction worker in Siliguri, had visited home to attend a family wedding. He lay motionless in a pool of blood with a bullet injury to his chest after the raiding team tried to arrest one of Bishnu’s relatives after failing to find him at home and, in the process, entered into a brawl with the protesting villagers.
The raid was part of the police crackdown on people they believed were involved in the arson at the Kaliagunj police station and large-scale rioting in the area the day before over the alleged rape and murder of a local 17-year-old Rajbangshi girl. While the police claimed that the victim’s post-mortem report showed no major signs of external injury and that the death was caused by poisoning, the issue had already led to large-scale violence and visuals of mobs mercilessly thrashing men in uniform who were begging for mercy had angered Banerjee who also doubles up as the state home minister.
“Were the policemen wearing bangles,” she reportedly remarked during a review meeting at Nabanna the next morning.
“Why did the police take so much time to let people know about the post-mortem report of the Kaliagunj victim? If the people are informed about the emerging investigation details, then media trials can be prevented from taking place,” Banerjee said at the Malda meeting.
“Then the police, too, have been beaten up badly. The BDO’s office was ransacked. How can the rioters find the courage to do such things? If the police show slackness in duty then they must admit their fault before the people. But police have uniforms on them and if that uniform is manhandled, then that cannot be forgiven,” she added.
Responding to Banerjee’s comments, BJP leader Dilip Ghosh said: “There are many witnesses to the fact that the victim was shot dead by Mamata Banerjee’s police. And now she asks who shot him. TMC has no foothold in north Bengal and this is her frustration speaking. People will reply on ballots during the upcoming panchayat polls.”
In yet another significant allegation from the same meeting, Banerjee alleged that teams from Delhi are being pushed to the state to stoke communal and ethnic clashes in the state.
“There is a conscious effort to portray Bengal’s law and order situation in a dim light. A team of 20-25 people had arrived from Delhi. They had a meeting. They devised plans to orchestrate ethnic clashes. Not just between Hindus and Muslims, but also between groups like Bengalis and Rajbangshis, between Kurmis and Adivasis, between Matuas and another community,” she said.
“Some Muslim youths are being paid to flare up communal tensions. They do such things only for the money. We are getting to know these things. We have to keep a close eye on these developments. No one, except some spurious political leaders, wants riots to take place,” she added while insisting on the need to improve intelligence gathering.
Sukanta Majumder, state BJP president responded: “If the CM had information about these outsiders plotting violence, what was her police doing? Why did the police arrest these people at once?”
