On Monday, a rally in Kolkata by the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, the student wing of the Bharatiya Janata Party, turned disorderly, attempting to break through police barricades in order to rush into the campus of Jadavpur University.
The march was held to protest the events of Friday, where Mumbai-based filmmaker Vivek Agnihotri screened a film at the Jadavpur University campus. The screening, conducted without any authorisation from the university and in the presence of BJP/ABVP supporters, saw violence break out between party workers and Jadavpur students.
The University filed a first information report against four BJP workers for allegedly sexually assaulting female students, while BJP leader Roopa Ganguly attempted to break into the campus along with more than 100 supporters to rescue the accused party workers, blaming the Jadavpur students in turn of assaulting them.
Barricading the university
With exams on at Jadavpur, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad rally was seen with anxiety by the university. On Sunday, Vice Chancellor Suranjan Das had appealed to the ABVP to ensure a peaceful rally. However, given the high probability of of violence, Kolkata Police had sealed off access to the campus. The ABVP workers, numbering around 500, were to march to a point around half a kilometre from the University, outside the Jadavpur Police Station.
Shouting slogans such as “Bharat Mata ki Jai” and “Doodh mangoge to kheer denge, Kashmir mangoge to cheer denge” (ask for milk and we’ll give you pudding, ask for Kashmir and we’ll rip you to shreds), the crowd was charged up by the time it had reached Jadavpur Police Station. Here, as the numbers grew, there was a sudden run on the police barricades around 500 metres away – and only a few feet away from the university gates.
The Kolkata Police were prepared for such a situation and a double set of barricades kept the violent ABVP workers away as they tried to breach the police defences and get at the university.
The police, it was clear, were under strict orders to not use force, even when their barricades were being attacked. Policemen pleaded with the crowd (see a policeman folding his hands at 1:03) and even declared the assembly unlawful (2:46) while requesting the ABVP crowd to stop attacking the police barricades. The small size of the mob and the double barricades, though, ensured that the police’s defences held.
"Jadavpur girls kiss men openly, have no shame"
Later, in a belligerent speech, ABVP’s state secretary Subir Haldar declared that, “If these leftist even so much as step outside Jadavpur, I’ll hack their legs off”.
Another speaker responded to the accusations of sexual assault against BJP workers on Friday. Suman Dutta, district secretary of the ABVP, asked rhetorically, “Have you seen the faces of the women who have made that accusation? Can they even be molested? Do they have any modesty? If not, how can they be molested?” Dutta also accused Jadavpur's female students of "kissing men openly, everyday".
Later, speaking to Scroll.in, Haldar dismissed attempts by ABVP workers to breach the police barricade. “There was only an attempt to break the barricade, but they weren’t broken were they?” he said. “We have had a peaceful protest march.”
Given the expectation of trouble, Kolkata Police took the uncommon step of completely shutting down the three-kilometre route of the march on Gariahat Road, one of the city’s main thoroughfares, throwing traffic out of gear on Monday evening.
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