Mamata Banerjee slams Assam ‘no-entry’ as super emergency

SILCHAR/KOLKATA: An eight-member Trinamool Congress delegation that went to Assam following the exclusion of 40 lakh names from the final draft of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) was detained at Silchar airport moments after they landed there on Thursday.
Starting at 2pm, what unfolded was an eight-hour-long fracas packed with bitter exchanges between Assam Police and the TMC leaders, with cops slapping criminal charges on the West Bengal chief minister for fomenting enmity on grounds of religion, race and place of birth.

At the time of going to the press, the delegation members were still at the Silchar airport.

The incident evoked strong responses from Trinamool and BJP, from Assam to Bengal. Mamata Banerjee said that the country was passing through a “Super Emergency” in which Trinamool MPs were being “beaten up” inside the airport.

“Our MPs had gone there to hold a convention of Assam citizens. The Assam Police didn’t allow them to step out of the airport. Some of the members have been beaten by the police. Do they have something to hide? Is this political vendetta? All this happened after Union home minister Rajnath Singh assured that there will be no harassment,” the CM said after returning from Delhi.

The eight-member team had reached around 1.30 pm to attend a citizens’ convention in the city and was also supposed to visit Nagaon and Guwahati on Friday. The team included six MPs — Sukhendu Sekhar Ray, Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar, Ratna De Nag, Nadimul Haque, Arpita Ghosh and Mamata Thakur — and Bengal urban development minister Firhad Hakim and MLA Mahua Moitra.

“The DG and everyone else from the police were at the airport. Our chief whip in the Rajya Sabha, who has a pacemaker, was roughed up by the police. Mahua Moitra was roughed up and hit by the police, as were Mamata Thakur and Dr Kakoli Ghosh. The pictures are there for all to see,” TMC national spokesperson Derek O’Brien said.

“What is going on? The senior-most member of the delegation, Sukhendu Sekhar Roy, had a discussion with the police. He told the cops if Section 144 is on, where is the notification? The notification was not shown to him. TMC lawmakers did not go there to break the law. They are lawmakers, not law-breakers,” he added.

BJP’s Bengal president Dilip Ghosh blamed TMC for all the trouble. “Who had invited them to Assam? They went on their own. There has been no violence in Assam so far. There was no such delegation to meet victims’ families when 70-75 people were killed in the run-up to Bengal rural polls. The West Bengal CM’s attitude towards NRC is negative and confusing. The Assam governor had written to the Centre about the rising infiltration from Bangladesh earlier. We called on the West Bengal governor and demanded an NRC for Bengal,” Ghosh said.

Roy, who was leading the Assam delegation, said: “We want to know if the law and order in Silchar was bad and that was what prompted the state administration to confine us at the airport. The Assam Police manhandled our women members.” Police did the same to Hakim.

Guwahati Police has announced that Trinamool will not be allowed to hold any agitations in Guwahati.

The Trinamool ante, however, got a little weak after Assam Trinamool president Dwipen Pathak and two other party leaders resigned in protest against Banerjee’s opposition to the final draft of the NRC, hours after the delegation reached Silchar. “It is of little significance. He had fought the elections only once, the one before the last,” the CM said.

Pathak, a former MLA from Hajo, said he had apprised the party leadership of the “ground realities” in Assam after the publication of the final NRC and urged Banerjee not to send the delegation to the northeastern state now. TMC members Pradip Pachani of Sibsagar and Diganta Saikia of Golaghat also resigned with Pathak.

Additional DGP Mukesh Agarwal said, “The Trinamool delegates have been taken into preventive detention under Section 151 of the CrPC for fear of possibility of disruption in law and order in the Barak Valley.” The airport is about 25 km from Silchar town.

Agarwal denied allegations of physical assault on any Trinamool leader. He said, “We know the constitutional importance of parliamentarians and legislators and we have treated them according to their privileges.” He added that two policewomen were injured while trying to maintain order inside the airport.

In Guwahati, DGP Kuladhar Saikia said, “We had requested the delegation not to come to Silchar. We feared that their visit might create differences among people here.”