Kolkata, April 13 Two BJP Lok Sabha members from West Bengal, on Sunday, wrote separate letters to Union Home Minister Amit Shah seeking intervention in the prevailing tension in Murshidabad district which has been on the boil for the last few days after protests against the recently promulgated Waqf (Amendment) Act turned violent and targetted Hindus.
The two MPs who wrote letters to HM Shah are Jagannath Sarkar from the Ranaghat Lok Sabha constituency in the Nadia district and Jyotirmay Singh Mahato from the Purulia constituency.
In his letter to the Union Home Minister, Sarkar accused the state administration in West Bengal of remaining silent when the tension broke out.
Sarkar’s points in the letter were echoes of the observations made by a special division bench of Calcutta High Court on Saturday evening that measures taken by the West Bengal government to control communal unrest in the Murshidabad district during the last few days were not adequate.
While ordering the immediate deployment of Central Armed Police Forces (CAPF) personnel in Murshidabad, the special division bench also observed that had the CAPF deployment been earlier, the situation would not have been so “grave” and “volatile”.
In his letter, Sarkar also requested HM Shah to deploy a high-level “investigating and monitoring” team from the Union Ministry of Home Affairs to assess the ground realities in Murshidabad and other troubled pockets in the state.
Jyotirmay Singh Mahato, in his letter to HM Shah, claimed that the fear, isolation, and targeted violence that Bengali Hindus in these districts are facing currently “echoes the Kashmiri Pandit exodus” in the 1990s.
“The tragic silence of the administration, deliberate targeting of a religious community, propaganda-driven unrest are all too familiar,” Mahato said in the letter.
He also urged the Union Home Minister to consider declaring the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA) in certain districts in West Bengal which are having International Borders with Bangladesh, namely Murshidabad, Malda, Nadia, and South 24 Parganas, under Section 3 of the AFSPA Act, 1958.
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