Four employees were arrested from a bar-cum-restaurant in South City Mall in south Kolkata for allegedly running a hookah bar on Friday.
Senior officers of the detective department, who were part of the team that raided the bar-cum-restaurant, said they found a hookah bar at one end of the eatery.
“We arrested four persons who said they were employees of the hookah bar,” said a senior officer of the detective department.
“A case has been registered with Jadavpur police station against the four employees, the owner of the place and a few others,” said the officer.
The four arrested have been identified as Javed Ahmed, Pradip Rana, Mohammad Ayub and Dudh Kumar Sardar.
They have been charged under Sections 188 and 120B of the Indian Penal Code and Section 20(2) of the Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products Act, 2003.
A fortnight back, on December 2, Kolkata’s mayor Firhad Hakim had declared that the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) would stop issuing licences for hookah bars.
He had also said the civic body would issue a notice announcing that all existing permissions for hookah bars stood cancelled.
Following the announcement, the police had arrested four persons from three hookah parlours in two days.
Senior officials of the civic body said that officially, only around 40 establishments in the Kolkata municipal area had the permission to serve hookah.
However, in reality, many more hookah bars operated in the city.
The South City bar was opened recently.
“We have asked for all the documents from the owner. Once the papers reach us, we will be able to say whether it was ever issued a licence to function as a hookah bar,” an officer said.
Following the KMC’s decision on hookah bars, the Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation, too, decided to shut down all hookah bars in its area.
The civic body has sent a letter to the police commissioner of Bidhannagar seeking the police’s “intervention and help” to enforce its order.
