Protesters break through a police barricade during the demonstration in front of chief minister Manik Sarkar’s residence at Agartala on Monday. Picture by UB Photos

Agartala, Nov. 17: The fragmented Tripura unit of the Congress, confronting a thorough overhaul by the party high command in its leadership structure, has called a 12-hour Tripura strike on November 20 to protest lathicharge on its workers by CRPF jawans.

The Congress’s much-vaunted “civil disobedience” programme to press for chief minister Manik Sarkar’s resignation as well as to protest a “series of scams and scandals” has turned out to be a damp squib.

The leader of the Opposition, Sudip Roy Barman, tried to project it as an “organisational success” to impress the Congress high command and the party’s newly appointed general secretary V. Narayanswamy.

The response to the rally was so poor that Barman and his followers did not dare to organise the meeting in front of Rabindra Bhawan, the traditional site for such meetings, let alone the much bigger Swami Vivekananda Ground. Finally, a little more than 2,000 people gathered in front of Aparupa Bakery on Akhaura Road opposite Barman’s ancestral home in the heart of Agartala town.

The unruly Congress workers started fomenting trouble at Indira Gandhi Memorial Square, a little west of the meeting site, by engaging in scuffles with CRPF jawans and by throwing stones at them. The CRPF jawans resorted to a mild lathicharge in which at least 20 people, including a number of pedestrians, were injured.

Barman himself engaged in a scuffle with officer-in-charge of West Agartala police station Milan Dutta and later with some CRPF jawans. DSP (central) Rajendra Dutta was allegedly slapped by a group of Congress workers.

Flak for media: Perturbed by the series of exposures of scams and scandals involving crores of rupees over the last three months, the CPM has trained its guns on the media, specially because of “personally motivated attacks” on chief minister Manik Sarkar and the party.

Minister for information Bhanulal Saha last night vented his ire on adverse media coverage by asking reporters to evolve a “self-made code of conduct and self-imposed discipline and censorship”. Saha was speaking as the chief guest at a National Press Day programme last night organised by the Agartala Press Club.

“We are all for media’s freedom and we do not believe in imposing restrictions, but we feel that the time has come when the media itself should enforce a self-made code of conduct besides imposing discipline and censorship,” Saha said.