Chitrangada Singh, a six-year-old golfer at the Calcutta Ladies Golf Club, could not chip or putt on the greens on Monday morning. “The area around the course was so dirty,” she complained. Picture by Pabitra Das

Battlelines were drawn over the mauled Maidan with the high court breaking convention to take cognisance of a verbal complaint against the CPM’s youth wing and party boss Biman Bose urging the rally brigade to be defiant.

Armed with newspaper reports on the impact of Saturday’s rally on the Maidan, green activist Subhas Dutta reached the high court on Monday morning to make a verbal submission against the Democratic Youth Federation of India (DYFI).

He said the organisers of the rally had cooked up a storm on the Maidan in violation of the high court’s order banning the use of chullahs within three kilometres of the Victoria Memorial.

They also drilled more than 1,000 holes on the greens and lined up 130-odd vehicles despite a ban on parking in the area.

The division bench of Justice B. Bhattacharya and Justice R.N. Banerjee asked Dutta to file an affidavit within three weeks. “Photographs and clippings of reports in newspapers should be appended to your petition,” the judges said.

The court normally doesn’t take cognisance of a complaint until a petition is filed with the department concerned.

The CPM state secretary advised the DYFI leadership “not to be unnerved” by the backlash. “You needn’t worry about the hue and cry raised by a section of media and so-called ecologists. You are moving in the right direction. I visited the ground on Monday and saw that our youth volunteers had cleaned it up perfectly,’’ a source quoted Bose as saying during the DYFI state conference on Monday.

The army wasn’t impressed by the DYFI’s “perfect” clean-up act, though.

A three-member team from Fort William, which is the custodian of the Maidan, inspected the greens and came back dissatisfied with the “restoration work” that the volunteers claimed to have done. A joint inspection with the DYFI is slated for Tuesday.

“The greens are still in a mess,” an army spokesperson said. “We found the Maidan littered with trash. Most of the holes that were drilled have not been filled up. Rallies won’t be allowed on the Maidan in future if the organisation does not complete the restoration work properly.”

When Metro visited the Maidan, three workers were filling up the holes with sand and mud. The makeshift toilets and the stage had been dismantled.

Any organisation wanting to use the Maidan must give an undertaking to the army that it would abide by the rules and restore the ground to its original condition.

Bose didn’t name Dutta but left no doubt about who his prime target was. “I don’t know what expertise this pseudo environmentalist has or where he has studied the subject. Why doesn’t he care for the environs of the town where he lives instead of making a fuss over the greens in Calcutta?’’ Bose asked.

Howrah is Dutta’s hometown.

Taking a cue from the party boss, DYFI state secretary Avash Roychoudhury accused media of being biased. “The most unfortunate aspect of the media coverage was that nobody highlighted what our rally stressed — the need for employment avenues.”