NEW DELHI: The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) on Tuesday sought a report from the West Bengal government within 72 hours on the incident in which eight people were burnt to death in Birbhum district after a dozen houses were torched.
This came after a delegation of BJP MPs from the state, including Locket Chatterjee, met Union Home Minister Amit Shah and sought his intervention to bring the spate of violence in Bengal under control. In a communication, the ministry asked the state government to maintain law and order and ensure security of common people, officials said.
Speaking to the media at the party headquarters later, the BJP demanded an impartial probe by either the CBI or the NIA. Party spokesperson Gaurav Bhatia and Chatterjee accused Trinamool Congress chief and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee of being hell-bent upon turning the state into ‘Badalapur’ (a land of revenge) and giving a free hand to goons to unleash terror and execute killings like the one in Birbhum.
Chatterjee alleged incidents like these had become commonplace in Bengal in TMC rule. The Bengal BJP has moved to Calcutta High Court over the incident, which appeared to be preplanned, she alleged.
The nine-member delegation that met Shah alleged that the post-poll violence in Bengal continued unabated. “The increasing use of explosives and firearms points towards terrorists being actively used by the TMC to settle political scores and to spread terror among the common citizens,” they told the home minister. “We cannot allow the lives of our citizens to be put at risk under increasing political terrorism in the state any more,” they said.
Late in the evening, BJP president JP Nadda formed a five-member fact-finding committee to visit and gather evidence from the site and submit a detailed report to the party.
The members of the panel are Brijlal, ex-DGP of UP and now Rajya Sabha MP; Satyapal Singh, former Mumbai Police chief and now RS MP; KC Ramamuthy, MP and former IPS officer from Karnataka; Bharati Ghosh, BJP spokesperson and former IPS officer from Bengal; and Sukanta Mazumdar, MP and Bengal BJP president.