Attack on Congress Legislature Party leader fuels Bengal violence; bandh today

Violence erupted across West Bengal on Thursday as a spillover of the attack on a Congress Legislature Party team which was visiting trouble-torn villages in Burdwan’s Mongolkot, allegedly by CPM supporters, on Wednesday. As news of the incident spread, Congress workers blocked roads, railway tracks and set state buses on fire before calling a Bengal bandh on Friday.

In New Delhi, Union Home Minister P Chidambaram said he had been briefed about the situation in the affected areas. “We have sent a message to the state government and asked them to send a report. Let the report come,” he said, adding that the Home Secretary had spoken to the state Chief Secretary.

Clearly on the backfoot, the CPM and the state government took a soft stand, with Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee assuring that the culprits will be punished. The Trinamool Congress, on the other hand, extended its “moral support” for the bandh

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Two Bengal bandh stories: students fight back, German Nano engineer grounded

What do a bunch of students of the Indira Gandhi Open University have in common with Ritter Wolfgang Schulder, a german engineer, working on Tata’s Nano Car.?

They were both caught in 12 hours bandh called by the Left Front government in West Bengal today against fuel price hike. But while the students, through sheer grit, got around the strike. Schuler and another Austrian engineer were stranded in the city trying to figure out why state that says it will roll out the world’s cheapest car shutsdown protesting the “global oil shock”.

A batch of over 100 IGNOU students defined the bandh and appeared for their examination today by arriving at their centres in the early hours of dawn, well before the bandh began at 6 a.m. Mithu Chattapdhyay from Hooghly, who had to take her Master’s in Library and Information Science, did not want the effort she had put in for months to go in Vain. So she boarded a train at 3:40 a.m. along with her husband. Tumpa Chowdhury, a teacher of English at a school in Burdwan, three hours away, set off from home late last night itself.

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