(From top) The mob tries to overturn a police van.Firemen take a body away from the trouble zone. Telegraph pictures

Dinhata, Feb. 5: Udayan Guha has never before been in the limelight.

In 2006, he failed to hold on to the Dinahata Assembly seat that his father, Forward Bloc stalwart Kamal Guha, had won since 1977.

Sitting in the party office today, he was gunning for police. “Over the past three days, they had been urging me to keep the cadres calm. I told them everything would be peaceful as long as they didn’t provoke our supporters. That is exactly what they did,” Guha said.

Guha, a graduate from Dinhata College, entered politics at 17.

He said he had never seen the police behave this way. “We wanted to meet the SDO, but the police started beating our women for no reason. That sparked the trouble. They were ruthless and working on a plan scripted by their CPM masters,” he said.

Guha had joined the Bloc students’ wing, Chhatra Bloc, as a schoolgoer. After a long stint with the student and youth wings, Guha was inducted into the party’s state committee in 2001.

He was a businessman dealing in fertilisers and seeds and he gave it up for politics.

He declared assets worth Rs 1.2 crore in his affidavit before the Assembly elections.

Father Kamal, who passed away in August last year, had bypassed many senior leaders to ensure the ticket for his son. But Guha failed to live up to the expectations. He lost to the Trinamul Congress’s Ashok Mondol.