BJP’s Nabanna Chalo Abhijan turned violent
The BJP’s Nabanna Chalo Abhijan (‘March to Nabanna’) in Kolkata on September 13 turned out to be a big ugly fight between the party’s supporters and the police.
Thousands of BJP supporters from across Bengal had arrived in Kolkata and Howrah to march to the state secretariat building, Nabanna to protest against the alleged corruption, in various aspects, in the Trinamool Congress government. However, to prevent the marchers from reaching Nabanna, the police had turned a 5-km zone around the building into a fortress.
Nabanna is located in the district of Howrah, on the bank of the Hooghly across the Vidyasagar Setu from Kolkata.
The BJP supporters were stopped at various places by the police. This led to violent clashes. Several police officers and some saffron camp leaders were injured. Police fired tear gas shells and used water cannons at various places to quell the crowd, which threw stones and beat up police officers.
BJP supporters even set two police vans on fire. Youth Congress’s all-India chief BY Srinivas tweeted a video of saffron T-shirt-clad men surrounding a ransacked police vehicle and trying to set it on fire using a cigarette lighter, and earlier another video showing saffron-clad BJP supporters, waving BJP flags, ransacking the same vehicle.
The Nabanna Chalo Abhijan actually turned out to be a damp squib from the point of view of the stated objective. Barricading at strategic points and preventive detention of several BJP leaders (BJP state president Sukanta Majumdar had to be arrested) effectively thwarted the protest marches’ from reaching anywhere near Nabanna.
