Midnapore Durga Puja

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Midnapore hawkers have a black Puja
Statesman News Service MIDNAPORE, Oct. 9: Midnapore hawkers were in no mood to celebrate Durga Puja this week after their shops were looted and set ablaze by police in a midnight raid recently.Fifty hawkers selling their goods near Midnapore Central Bus Stand and on Mangal Pande Sarani were ruined after their shops were looted and later set ablaze by police in their undeclared midnight eviction drive on 1 October. Secretary of Sara Bangla Hawker O Kshudra Baybasayee Samiti, Mr Sankar Das, alleged hawkers had incurred a loss of approximately Rs 25 lakh and said the taxi stand was also demolished. Mr Das said they would lodge a complaint with the West Bengal Human Rights Commission unless they were compensated by the police and guilty police officers were punished for the incident. He had spoken to the IGP (western zone), Mr Kuldip Singh, who had visited Midnapore on 3 October to investigate the incident.Mr Singh had ruled out the possibility of giving any compensation to the affected hawkers though he did not approve of the eviction drive while people were celebrating Id. The raid triggered a police-hawker clash in which two police jeeps were damaged and torched the following morning.The IG discussed the incident with the district magistrate and the Midnapore municipality chairman but he did not meet any of the affected hawkers nor did he walk near the site where some burnt structures still stood, presumably to avoid an embarrassing interaction with the hawkers. Mr Singh had only looked at the skeletons of burnt shops through the windows of his car as the convoy slowed down at the spot.The IG tried to downplay the matter by saying the police officers were on a mission to erect barbed fencing around the SP’s bungalow and blamed journalists for “playing up” the “trifling” issue.But the civic chief, Mr Pranab Basu, reportedly told the IG that pillars were planted on the road to raise the fencing, several feet off the bungalow’s boundary wall, thus there was no reason to remove the taxi stand.Meanwhile, the district Congress president Mr Nirmal Ghosh, in a memorandum to the IG, demanded the “SP, Mr Rajesh Singh, under whose instruction the barbarous attack and looting of poor hawkers’ shops were perpetrated in a cold-blooded and calculated manner, surpassing any anti-social style, and torched the shops to demolish all evidences, be removed immediately after being awarded exemplary punishment”.“The law and order situation in the district would deteriorate if this lazy, inhuman SP is retained even for one day,” the PCC leader further warned. source: the statesman

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