Oxygen cylinders and condensers, property deeds, plastic buckets, government logo-embossed tarpaulin sheets, stoves, a pile of mattresses, even air pistol purchase receipts.
All this and more spilled out on Friday from a single-storey building in Survey Park, where the Trinamool Congress had a “party office” for six years.
The building, close to the Survey Park police station and not far from Hiland Park off EM Bypass, had been shut since the party’s drubbing at the hands of the BJP on May 4.
“We opened it today and found all these things inside,” an elderly resident of the area said.
A group of CPM supporters and functionaries had led the raid, forcing the doors open. Local CPM supporters claimed the office belonged to the party before Trinamool usurped it in 2020.
Sources in the police, who have seized the materials found, said some of these seemed to have been meant for relief during the pandemic or natural disasters.
The stacks of tarpaulin sheets and the blue and green plastic buckets carried the Bengal government’s logo. Sources said the buckets were meant for distribution among households for the segregation of wet and dry waste.
Some residents of the area said the haul was further evidence of corruption under the Mamata Banerjee administration, and showed how the division between party and government had been blurred on her watch.
“Dozens of tarpaulin sheets with the Biswa Bangla logo, lots of property deeds, mutation papers and other documents were found,” a resident said.
“Oxygen cylinders, which were in high demand during the pandemic, were also there. We never got any help from this party office.”
Several chequebooks and bank passbooks, allegedly belonging to individuals, too were found.
“Why would a party office keep someone’s chequebook or passbook unless there’s some ulterior motive?” a resident asked.
A CPM supporter said Trinamool had “taken over” two of his party’s offices in the area, the other being in Baghajatin.
Taking control of a rival’s party office after an electoral triumph has been a brazen but common instance of political hooliganism in Calcutta down the years. The BJP, too, has been accused of forcibly grabbing Trinamool offices since May 4.
“The CPM office in Baghajatin was taken over in 2018, and this one (in Survey Park) in 2020. We were told that this office would be used to help people during the pandemic,” the CPM supporter, who declined to be named, said.
Many residents had turned up to see what was inside the office, which they said they had “never been allowed” to enter.
“I have been a BJP supporter for many years. Honestly, I had no clue what was being stocked inside because they never allowed BJP supporters to step inside their party offices. They would terrorise us,” a homemaker said.
Friday’s shocker comes a day after about 100 Aadhaar cards, ration cards and voter identification cards were found inside a closed Trinamool office in Tangra.
Earlier this month, a stash of Aadhaar cards had been found inside another Trinamool office, at Basanti Colony in Salt Lake.
These raids and discoveries, too, have been attributed to local people.
Officers at the Survey Park police station said an inquiry had been started into Friday’s haul.
“Two people have been detained. We are trying to find out why these items, which appear to be relief materials from the state government, were stocked in a party office instead of being distributed,” an officer of the East Division of Kolkata Police said.
“The documents found are under investigation, too.”
The Trinamool office is in Ward 109 and falls in the Jadavpur Assembly constituency, represented by Trinamool politician Debabrata Majumdar from 2021 to 2026 before he lost to his BJP rival. Majumdar declared himself “clueless” about the haul.
“I have no idea what was there inside that party office,” he told this newspaper.