Kolkata, March 10 A fresh petition at a division bench of the Calcutta High Court was filed on Monday alleging police excesses against the students of Kolkata’s iconic Jadavpur University (JU) in the March 1 ruckus case.
Two students were hospitalized after being “allegedly and deliberately” hit by the vehicle of West Bengal Education Minister Bratya Basu on the university premises.
The fresh petition has been filed at the same single judge bench of Justice Tirthankar Ghosh, which had last week, while hearing a similar case on the Jadavpur University crisis, expressed ire over the alleged “biased and one-sided” investigation by the Kolkata Police. The court had also directed the city police to register FIRs based on the complaints filed by the university students instead of just addressing the complaints filed by the Trinamool Congress-affiliated West Bengal College & University Professors’ Association (WBCUPA).
The fresh petition was filed by Uddipan Kundu, an activist of CPI(M)’s student wing, the Students’ Federation of India (SFI). The matter is likely to be heard on Tuesday.
In the petition, Kundu has accused the police of “repeatedly” and “unnecessarily” summoning the university students in the name of an investigation.
He accused the police of harassing the students when the latter refused to hand over their mobile phones to the cops during the earlier interrogation of March 7. Thereafter, Kundu alleged, the same students were summoned again by the cops for interrogation.
On March 1, a ruckus broke out within the university campus when the Minister's car was allegedly stopped after it entered the campus, and a scuffle followed. The students were demanding immediate elections for the university’s students’ council.
The agitating students alleged that while Base decided to leave the campus in the face of the protests, his vehicle deliberately hit the two agitating students, following which they were severely injured and had to be hospitalized.
Amid the protests, the Minister received minor injuries and fell sick. He was taken to the state-run S.S.K.M. Medical College & Hospital and was discharged later.
During the hearing on another case in the same matter last week, Justice Ghosh made some observations on the intelligence failure of the Special Branch of the Kolkata Police, saying that they did not have prior information about student agitation while the Education Minister was there.
Drawing a reference to the recent students’ movement in Bangladesh, Justice Ghosh also observed that if such intelligence failures continue, the situation in the state might become serious in the future, like that in the neighboring country.
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