After BJP workers and police engaged in a heated street fight on Monday afternoon, the Chiriamore area on BT Road in Barrackpore, North 24 Parganas, appeared to be a war zone. Numerous BJP employees, including female employees, were hurt during the roughly thirty minutes that the altercation lasted and were taken to the hospital.
Following an attempted march toward the Barrackpore Police Commissionerate and a siege of the premises by BJP law violation rally led by the party’s state president Sukanta Majumdar in protest of the alleged decline in law and order in the area, the violence erupted.
After deploying tear gas and applying lathicharge, the police were able to disperse the demonstrators, who had gotten dangerously close to the Commissionerate building. To stop the demonstrations from going any farther, water guns were also employed against them. In response to the BJP workers using the water guns and teargas on the party supporters who were advancing the police were allegedly subjected to widespread brick batting. There was complete mayhem and chaos as the police were also observed tossing those bricks back as missiles at the political gathering. Many BJP employees, including some women, were taken into custody.
The chaos began when BJP workers broke through two of the four police-erected barricades on BT road in front of the commissionerate and launched water cannon jets at the gathering as it moved toward the third barricade. Brick-bashing the police right away resulted in them opening fire with tear gas shells and opening lathi charge. According to the BJP at least one woman worker suffered a broken leg as a result of police beating, and even female employees were brutally assaulted by men in uniform. Majumdar said that police were the ones who threw bricks at the BJP workers and refuted claims made by his party members that they were attacking the police with stones and bricks. Sheikh Shah Jahan is not who we are, We weren’t on the streets to ambush law enforcement. According to Majumdar, we broke through barricades in order to deliver a memo to the Barrackpore police commissioner about the breakdown of law and order in his jurisdiction.
For his action today, we will register a formal complaint against the CP as an individual and not as the local police chief. We will proceed through our advocates and legal cell. He continued, we have video evidence of police assault, particularly of our women staff, so we will also move the National Women’s Commission. Majumdar was overheard threatening the police, threatening to start a civil disobedience movement at the site if they forced him to release the workers who had been arrested.
Later that day, Suvendu Adhikari, the leader of the state’s opposition, announced the launch of an audio-visual campaign against the Trinamool and promised to see through to the end to punish corrupt police officers.
