Silent rally against vandalising of Syama Prasad's statue

Protesting the attack on Bharatiya Jana Sangh founder Syama Prasad Mookerjee's statue in Kolkata, West Bengal BJP's youth wing Yuba Morcha activists walked in a silent rally here on Sunday.

The rally was held from south Kolkata's Hazra to Syama Prasad Mookherjee's house in the nearby Bhawanipore area.

Terming the rally as a token protest against the vandalism, the rallyists said they are not happy with the state government's role in handling the issue and reiterated the party's claim to reinstall the statue as soon as possible.

"It is shameful that Bengalis were involved in vandalising the statue of someone who did so much for Bengal and its people. We are not satisfied with the role of the Bengal government in the issue, nor do we expect anything better from them," Debjit Sarkar, state Yuba Morcha president told IANS.

"But as our state party (Bharatiya Janata Party) chief Dilip Ghosh said, we want the statue to be put back to its previous state with honour," he said.

He also claimed the attack cannot be called a counter offensive for the razing of Lenin's statue in Tripura, as according to him, the incident in Tripura was a spontaneous reaction of the people's rage towards the erstwhile Left regime.

"People are saying they broke the statue of Mookerjee here to protest an incident in Tripura. First of all, that incident has no relation with Bengal. Also, even if some BJP supporters were involved in the attack on Lenin's statue, it was mostly the common people who came out and did that to announce the end of Left rule there," the BJP leader claimed.

"We hope the Trinamool government would take note of our protest here and do the needful," he added.

Seven members of an extremist Left-wing student organisation were arrested for allegedly vandalising and blackening a marble bust of Syama Prasad Mookerjee in Kolkata's Keoratola crematorium ground last week.

The incident happened after a statue of Dravidian icon and social reformer E.V.R. Ramasamy, popularly known as Periyar, was razed in Tamil Nadu's Vellore, while two statues of Russian communist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin were pulled down in Tripura allegedly by the BJP-RSS activists.

--IANS

mgr/ssp/pgh/bg