Udayan and Kamal Guha

Dinhata, Feb. 5: Udayan Guha had never before been in the limelight barring the 2006 polls when he failed to hold on to the Dinhata Assembly seat that his father, Forward Bloc veteran Kamal Guha, had represented since the Left Front came to power in 1977.

After today’s mayhem in front of the subdivisional office, a ruffled Guha, sitting at the party office here, blamed police for the violence.

“They had been visiting me for the past three days and urging me to keep our cadre calm during today’s agitation. I told them that everything should remain peaceful provided they did not provoke our supporters, and today that is exactly what they did,” Guha said.

A graduate of Dinhata College, Guha, who entered politics at the age of 17, said he had never seen the police behave like this before.

“We wanted to meet the SDO and for no reason, the police started beating up our women supporters. That is what sparked the trouble. They were ruthless and went back on their word. They were acting in a manner scripted for them by their CPM masters.”

Guha said senior leaders from Calcutta like Hafiz Alam Sairani and Ashok Ghosh will arrive here tomorrow to chalk out the next course of action.

The political career of Guha dates back to his schooldays when he joined the Chhatra Bloc, the students’ wing of the party. After a long stint with the student and youth wings, Guha was inducted into the party’s state committee in 2001. He was then 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 to the Election Commission in 2006.

During the run-up to the polls, Kamal Guha, who passed away last August, had showed the door to many senior party members who wanted to contest the Dinhata seat.

However, the junior Guha failed to keep up to the promise and lost to Ashok Mondol of the Trinamul Congress.