A man sits among empty chairs at the CPM event at Curzon Park addressed by the chief minister. (Bishwarup Dutta)

Calcutta, Dec. 19: Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee can hear “the footsteps of an asuva shakti (evil force)” in educational institutions.

At a gathering of CPM-supporter schoolteachers today, the chief minister’s allusion was an indirect admission of the increasing clout of the Trinamul Congress in what once used to be a Left fief. But he finds competition “evil”, much in the same vain he had found evil in the opposition to his candidate for a cricket body election in 2006.

“Our state is going through a period of evil (asuva shomoy). An evil force is rearing its head in our society. Now its footsteps are being heard in our educational institutions also,” he said after unveiling the bust of a former leader of the All Bengal Teachers’ Association.

The chief minister was referring to the instances of violence this week at Asutosh College and Howrah’s Prabhu Jagadbandhu College. The SFI has called a students’ strike tomorrow to protest “Trinamul-sponsored atrocities”.

Not to be left behind, Trinamul supporters will walk from Netaji’s statue in Shyambazar to Esplanade tomorrow. Both the SFI and Trinamul Chhatra Parishad have also planned street protests, which could paralyse Calcutta streets.

At the Curzon Park event today, Bhattacharjee said he believed “the evil force will eventually be defeated.”

None from the CPM would comment on whether the many empty chairs at the venue on a mild December morning were also a result of the “evil force”. At least a third of the 450 red chairs were empty.

“What is happening in the colleges never happened before. One student lost his life, another lost vision in one of his eyes,” the chief minister said. Second-year BCom student Swapan Koley died after being beaten up by alleged Trinamul supporters and second-year English student Souvik Hazra’s left eyeball got ruptured in stone-pelting by rival unions at Asutosh College.

A beleaguered CPM pushed its student supporters to the frontline during the subsequent protests, trying an image makeover. Bhattacharjee iterated today the CPM’s reliance on students to turn the tide months before the Assembly elections. “The students are fighting these evil forces and they will win,” he said.

Branding adversaries “asuva (evil) is an old habit of the chief minister. He had dubbed cricket administrator Jagmohan Dalmiya’s victory in the Cricket Association of Bengal elections in 2006 “a victory of evil over good”. The chief minister had wanted Dalmiya to end his 14-year reign at Eden Gardens “for the sake of Bengal cricket” and foisted his own candidate, the then police commissioner Prasun Mukherjee, for president.

Four years later, addressing reporters at Alimuddin Street ahead of the civic polls in May this year, Bhattacharjee had likened Trinamul to “evil”. “Trinamul represents the forces of backwardness. I believe the people, particularly the youth, will defeat these evil forces,” he had said.

Although “evil” is an expression mostly associated with the chief minister, he has no monopoly on it in the CPM. State CPM chief Biman Bose had said during Trinamul’s Singur agitation: “The evil force that is opposing this (the acquisition of land for the Tata Nano project) does not want development of the state.”

Trinamul leaders smirked at the chief minister’s latest outburst. “We don’t know what will make him happy. Yesterday, he wanted the Opposition for cooperation, today he is calling us an evil force,” said Partha Chatterjee.

‘Kings’ told to leave

Bhattacharjee today asked CPM functionaries who think they are “kings” and treat the people as their “subjects” to leave the party, days after offering the same advice to “bossy people in the party”. His comments today came at a rally in North 24-Parganas.