Calcutta, March 24: Five women were arrested from Baghajatin in south Calcutta late last night for putting up posters allegedly “inciting people to wage war against the state”.

“The posters that these women, who we believe are Maoists, were putting up were objectionable and provocative, urging people to wage war against the government and take up arms to achieve their aims,” said inspector-general of police, law and order, Raj Kanojia.

The sections of the IPC under which they have been held deal with criminal conspiracy, waging war against the state and sedition.

One of the women, 35-year-old Kanika Debnath alias Soma, had been arrested by the CID earlier on similar charges but released on bail as the police could not establish the charges within the stipulated three months.

The police today said preliminary investigations had revealed that the five, from different parts of the city, belonged to the Nari Mukti Sangha, a frontal wing of the CPI (Maoist).

Unlike in some other states, the CPI (Maoist) is not a banned outfit in Bengal.

According to the police, the five women aged between 17 and 35 turned up at the Baghajatin station around 8pm yesterday and started pasting the posters on the walls of a shop on the platform.

Some of the hawkers there caught them and handed them over to the Citu-affiliated rickshaw pullers’ union.

The women were detained in the party office until the police arrived an hour later.

A spokesperson for the Nari Mukti Sangha said the charges were “trumped up”.

“There is nothing seditious in the posters that we put up,” said Kalpana Mukherjee.

“Our posters were against the CPM for its atrocities on women across Bengal, especially in Nandigram. Ours is not a banned organisation, which is why we were putting up posters in a crowded platform at eight in the evening and not in the dead of the night.”

“In the posters, we had also demanded that our comrade, Somen, be released from prison,” Mukherjee added.

Somen, the CPI (Maoist) state secretary, had been arrested last month.

The police refused to display the posters and said they would be produced in court during the trial.

“We will now investigate what else these women were up to, especially in the Ulta- danga-Maniktala zone where most of them live,” an officer of the Jadavpur police station said, adding that all five had been living in a rented house on the northern fringes of the city of late.

The families of two of the arrested women denied this when The Telegraph got in touch with them.

Minu Saha’s mother Basana said she was “shocked” to learn about her daughter’s arrest. “She had left home around 2.30pm yesterday, saying she was going to her friends. We didn’t worry when she didn’t return home at night thinking she had stayed over at the friend’s house and that she would return after work this evening,” Basana said, sitting in a Bagmari slum.

Minu worked as a labourer in a box manufacturing unit.

Kanika’s father, too, insisted that his daughter lived with them in their house in Jorabagan.