A rally organised by the BJP’s youth wing threw traffic across north and central Calcutta into disarray for several hours on Wednesday afternoon.
Central Avenue remained closed for more than an hour as party workers fought police who used water cannons and chased them with batons to prevent them from heading towards the Calcutta Municipal Corporation headquarters.
The Corporation Chalo, organised to protest the government’s “mishandling of dengue cases in the state”, began from the BJP’s state head office on Muralidhar Sen Lane in Colootala at 2pm.
The rally was headed towards the CMC’s headquarters on SN Banerjee Road but the police stopped party workers near Chandni Chowk Metro station.
Two layers of barricades were put up, one at the Ganesh Chandra Avenue-Central avenue crossing and another 150m south, in front of E Mall.
BJP workers broke through the first barricade and ran towards the second barricade but failed to get across.
Party workers pushed the steel barricades in front of E Mall, trying to topple them over while the police pushed them from the other side to keep them in place.
The police said there were 2,000-odd people in the rally, which was led by BJP’s state general secretary Raju Banerjee and youth wing president Debjit Sarkar. The rally had reached Chandni Chowk around 2.30pm when the workers were stopped at the barricades.
The rally left hundreds of people in despair. A 63-year-old resident of Shyambazar said it took her nearly two hours to reach Shyambazar from Quest Mall.
“I started at 2.40pm and reached Shyambazar at 4.30pm. Traffic was very slow on APC Road. The stretch from the Sealdah flyover to Maniktala was especially bad,” she said.
An officer said the clashes ended around 2.45pm. Forty-two people, including 13 women, were arrested from the rally venue. Four police personnel were injured, the officer said.
Traffic resumed on the closed stretch of CR Avenue and on the entire stretch to the south of MG Road-CR Avenue around 3pm.
The BJP has said youth wing president Sarkar and 60 workers have been hospitalised with injuries sustained in the clash with the police. The BJP’s youth wing workers have alleged that the state government and the corporation haven’t disclosed the actual figures while reporting the number of dengue cases in the city and the state.
State BJP president Dilip Ghosh alleged that the government didn’t allow him to raise questions on the matter in the Assembly when he was an MLA. “I was an MLA for three years, but not once was I allowed to debate the matter or to raise questions about it. There are 60,000 cases in the state right now… the state should call an all-party meeting or seek the Centre’s help,” Ghosh, who is the Midnapore MP, said.
At least 44,000 dengue cases have been reported in the state since January and nearly 15,000 of them in the past three weeks, state government officials said.
Twenty-three people have died across the state since January.
A CMC official said more than 2,500 cases had been reported in Calcutta this year and six people had died. State BJP president Ghosh said the party chose an afternoon for the rally because of fewer number of people on the roads. “Everyone is either at office or at school. This is not the peak traffic period,” Ghosh said.