Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee: Balm after the storm

Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee said on Tuesday that it wasn’t “proper” of police to try to search the Friends’ Row room rented by two girls and used as the office of a women’s organisation. The chief minister also said he had instructed the police to call off the operation immediately after learning about it.

“The police did not act properly and shouldn’t have gone to the mess where the girls had put up. It was not necessary for the police to interrogate them. After hearing about the incident from my confidential assistant, who saw it on TV, I immediately asked the police to withdraw from the spot,” said Bhattacharjee at Writers’ Buildings.

He added: “The police had no business inquiring about their brand of politics or whether they were associated with any political party.”

The chief minister’s admission of wrongdoing by his force came a day after home secretary Asok Mohan Chakrabarti said the men in uniform could search a room without a warrant if a cognisable offence had taken place or to prevent such an offence. “If the police come to know that I have an AK47 in my house, will they wait for a search warrant?” Chakrabarti had asked.

The Buddha balm had little effect on the students of Jadavpur University (JU), who prevented the police from searching the room and have been protesting the incident.

“The chief minister did not say anything on the action taken against the policemen for raiding our house without rhyme or reason,” said Puja Basu, a final-year student of English honours at JU and one of the five girls who were in the ground-floor room when the policemen knocked.

“All the students on the JU campus were shocked by the incident. The government seems to have got into a habit of making mistakes and then admitting them,” said Lokeshwari Dasgupta, an undergraduate student at the university.

At Writers’, the chief minister also dug up the violence at JU a year ago to illustrate how tolerant his administration is.

“Some students had ransacked and destroyed an employees’ office. After a one-man committee filed a report on the incident, the police wanted to register a case against the students. But I decided not to pursue the matter as I didn’t want policing on a university campus,” said Bhattacharjee.