Scribes attacked at Hindu ‘conversion’ programme

Acting swiftly, police on Wednesday arrested Tapan Ghosh,  chief of the Hindu Samhati, a right-wing group after its cadres attacked media men at a function in central Kolkata where the group was publicly “converting” 14 people including 8 children, sources said.

The incident took place at Rani Rashmoni Avenue in the State Capital’s central business district — barely a mile away from Lal Bazar police headquarters — where about 10,000 people had assembled to observe the foundation day of Hindu Samhati Mancha.

At least half-a-dozen journalists sustained injuries when they were roughed up and their cameras broken even as they tried to inquire into the circumstances of the stated “conversion” programme and the identity of the people being converted.

Apparently keyed up by alleged “provocative speeches from the dais targeting political parties, media and some particular communities the charged up crowd attacked us,” said a senior journalist of a Bengali news channel adding the media wanted to know the identity of those being converted even as the leaders on the dais bragged about organising “open conversion programmes.”

They said, “thus far conversions were done secretly. But today we are doing it in public while they converted Hussein Ali a middle-aged man with his wife and children and other family members,” sources said.

The police promptly swung into action while Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, “condemn the attack on the media,” and Ghosh was arrested. “He is being interrogated and more arrests may follow,” a senior officer said.

“Though I do not have much information about this it is unlikely that some Muslim person was converted,” a TMC leader and Minister Subroto Mukherjee apparently preferring his bizarre apologies to some particular community.

His ministerial colleague Firhad Hakim said “it is strange that such communal incidents should happen in Bengal and Kolkata. Hindu Samhati is as communal as the Jamaat and Bengal has no place for them.”

CPI(M)’s Sujan Chakrabarty said “all this is the product of Mamata Banerjee’s politics of hatred and violence where the space for political Opposition is fast narrowing down allowing the communal forces to fill the void.”

His party colleague and CPI(M) MP Md Salim said “those who attacked the media are goons of the BJP and the Trinamool Congress who have failed to find success in the extortion business which is the hallmark of Mamata Banerjee Government.”

The BJP however quickly distanced itself from the Wednesday’s incident even as its leader Shantanu Bose said “the BJP does not approve of such attacks on the media and condemns it anyway.”