cry against ‘police atrocity’, slur on mamata

Rajya Sabha MP and SFI’s national secretary Ritabrata Banerjee leads a blockade near the 8B bus stand in Jadavpur on Wednesday; (below) students of JU protest against alleged police atrocities. (Bibhas Lodh, Amit Datta and Bishwarup Dutta)

Jadavpur University on Wednesday witnessed the rare sight of leaders of different Leftist denominations and generations converging on the campus to own a cause more compelling than their usual ideological debates: police atrocities on students.

Led by the big brother of the Left stable, the CPM, the leaders exercised all possible strategies — from backing a statewide students’ strike to blocking Raja Subodh Mullick Road in Jadavpur — to show solidarity with a few hundred agitating university students.

As the day progressed, it became clear who their real target was. Slogans against the Mamata Banerjee government rent the air even as students of one of the more reputable academic institutions of the country protested Tuesday night’s alleged police crackdown on them during a gherao of the vice-chancellor.

“This is the beginning of the end of the Mamata Banerjee government,” said former Naxalite leader Ashim Chatterjee of Tuesday night’s incident on the campus.

The students had laid siege to the main administrative building of JU for more than 10 hours when the police intervened, apparently at the behest of Abhijit Chakraborty, the interim vice-chancellor.

The alleged police crackdown on the students, who were demanding dissolution of an internal committee for not handling a complaint about molestation properly, drew as much condemnation in the virtual world as on the campus.

Leaders of the beleaguered Left parties didn’t take long in parachuting down on the JU campus, which by Wednesday afternoon had become a melting pot of various kinds of protest.

“The scale and scope of the agitation seemed to increase by the hour. It had started off as a protest against police atrocities, but by the evening it was an all-out campaign against the government,” said an alumnus of JU who spent several hours on the campus.

Left organisations announced a procession from Dhakuria to the 8B bus stand in Jadavpur on Thursday, inviting non-Left groups to join in.

Over the past two years, the CPM has tried to build movements against the ruling Trinamul Congress on various issues, including the Saradha scam, the SSC exam fiasco and the mess in the transport sector that has prompted taxi operators to go on an indefinite strike starting Thursday.

Although rallies on these issues have attracted crowds, they haven’t benefited the Left in any electoral battle, including the recent bypolls.

On Wednesday, a gallery of known faces such as leader of the Opposition Surjya Kanta Mishra, the CPM’s South 24-Parganas secretary Sujan Chakraborty, SFI’s all-India secretary and Rajya Sabha MP Ritabrata Banerjee and former Naxalite leader Asim Chatterjee were seen on the JU campus.

Several other leaders of Left-affiliated organisations were there too, all of them promising to “stand by the students and teach the government a lesson”.

“The movement won’t be restricted to JU. This will spread throughout the state,” said Ritabrata Banerjee, standing outside the main gate of JU.

“It’s all about visibility. This is an issue concerning the students but we must stand by them,” said a senior CPM leader who didn’t wish to be named.

Apart from solidarity with the students, the CPM leaders’ presence on the campus was meant to achieve the twin targets of mounting pressure on chief minister Mamata and scouting for new faces who would be the future of a party that has lost its appeal among young voters.

For the CPM, the student community is all the more important as all senior leaders of the party today are products of the violent students’ movements of the Sixties and Seventies. Sources said one of the problems in complying with demands for a change in leadership after successive electoral debacles was the supply line of student leaders drying up.

Not to be outdone by the Left, the BJP, which has emerged as the main Opposition in Bengal, joined the protest bandwagon. The party knocked on the door of governor Keshari Nath Tripathi, also chancellor of the university, to seek the dismissal of the vice-chancellor and withdrawal of all cases against the students.

“The vice-chancellor acted like a political appointee and gave the police orders to assault the students. We want his removal,” state BJP president Rahul Sinha said.