He fell on my lap, I couldn't move in fear: J&K survivor recounts husband's death
She added that even after the terrorists left, there was no immediate help. Locals urged the remaining people to flee with their children in case the attackers returned. 'I carried my children barefoot through knee-deep mud to safety,' she said. Later, when she reported the lapse, an army personnel allegedly said, 'Why do you people go up there anyway?'Shital said she never imagined such an incident could happen. 'We trusted the government and our security forces,' she said, demanding that if the spot is such a danger zone, it should be shut down permanently.PAHALGAM TERROR ATTACKadvertisementOn Tuesday afternoon, five to six terrorists opened fire on a group of tourists in the Baisaran meadow, which is around 5 kms from Pahalgam. The meadow - also known as 'mini Switzerland' - is accessible only by foot or by horseback. The Pahalgam carnage was one of the deadliest civilian attacks in the Kashmir Valley in recent years.The Resistance Front (TRF), an offshoot of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, claimed responsibility for the attack.Eyewitnesses said the terrorists emerged from the surrounding pine forests and fired at people picnicking, riding ponies, or eating at food stalls. Most of the victims were tourists, including two foreigners from the UAE and Nepal, and two locals.Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah called the attack "much larger than anything we've seen directed at civilians in recent years".Tune InMust Watch
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India Today
32 minutes ago
- India Today
Paltu moment? Nitish Kumar declines to wear 'topi' at madrasa event
Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar was seen on Thursday refusing to wear a headgear offered to him during an event of the state madrasa board, with the opposition raising questions about his "secular credentials".The incident has stirred a political row ahead of the Bihar elections as Nitish has previously been seen donning a skull cap at Iftar parties and Islamic events over the incident happened as Nitish attended the centenary celebrations of the state madrasa education board in Patna. In the video, which has gone viral, a member of the board is initially seen attempting to put the Muslim headgear on Nitish's head. However, the Chief Minister refuses and takes it in his a photo-op on the stage, Bihar's Minority Minister Zama Khan is seen again persuading Nitish to put the cap on his head. However, Nitish declines and is seen putting the headgear on Khan's head ELECTIONS IN MIND?The development assumes significance as it comes just months ahead of the Assembly elections in Bihar. Muslims comprise about 18% of the state's population and hold sway over several the years, Nitish donning a traditional skull cup at Iftar events has been a regular feature. However, Nitish, who rejoined the NDA camp last year, was not seen wearing one during the Iftar party he hosted at his residence earlier this year in March. It is due to his frequent changing of sides that he has earned the sobriquet of "Paltu chacha".Of late, the JD(U)'s realpolitik has alienated a section of the Muslim community, especially after the party extended its support to the Waqf law, which expands government oversight on the management of Waqf properties donated by least five Muslim JD(U) leaders also quit the party earlier this year over Nitish's support to the bill, which was passed in Parliament in April but has been partly stayed by the Supreme JD(U)'s troubles have been compounded as the Election Commission's electoral roll revision has sparked fears of disenfranchisement of voters, especially in Muslim-majority districts.- EndsMust Watch
Indian Express
44 minutes ago
- Indian Express
Vivek Agnihotri's Bengal Files: Who was Gopal ‘Paantha' Mukherjee, and what did he do on Direct Action Day?
A resident of Kolkata, Shantanu Mukherjee (45), has complained to police that filmmaker Vivek Agnihotri's forthcoming Bengal Files tarnishes the image and reputation of his late grandfather Gopal Mukherjee. Agnihotri's film is about the communal riots that raged in Kolkata for four days beginning August 16, 1946, the date designated by the Muslim League as 'Direct Action Day' to create Pakistan. The Great Calcutta Killing was followed by bloody riots in Bombay, Noakhali (in today's Bangladesh), Bihar, Garhmukteshwar, and several places in Punjab over the next few months. Gopal Mukherjee, known by the moniker Gopal 'Paantha' because his family owned a mutton shop in central Kolkata's College Street (paantha is goat in Bangla), was a leader of one of the major street gangs that were active during the Direct Action Day violence in the city. Gopal Mukherjee and his group, supposedly comprising more than 800 young men, took it upon themselves to protect Hindus in their area from gangs of Muslim rioters. 'We have no problem with a film being made on Gopal Mukherjee. But the vulgar way in which he has been depicted is very offensive… The director did not consult us even once while making the film,' Shantanu Mukherjee told The Indian Express. In the official trailer of the film that is now available on YouTube, an actor in a beard and wearing long hair piled on top of his head apparently in a manner preferred by Gopal Mukherjee, declares that India is a nation of Hindus, blames Gandhian non-violence for the 'victory' of Jinnah, and is shown hacking frenziedly at people in the street with a sword. British Prime Minister Clement Atlee had announced the transfer of power in March 1946, although no date had been fixed. In May, the Cabinet Mission proposed a plan for an interim government, which both the Congress and Muslim League rejected. The League had committed itself to accepting nothing short of Partition and the creation of Pakistan. Its leader, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, proclaimed that there would now be 'either a divided India or a destroyed India'. In a public address, Jinnah declared that 'One India is [now] an impossible realisation… It will inevitably mean that the Muslim will be transferred from the domination of the British to the caste Hindu rule… Freedom must mean freedom… Hundreds of millions of Muslims will never agree merely to a change of masters.' (cited by Sam Dalrymple, Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia (2025)) On July 29, the League called on Muslims across India to observe August 16 as Direct Action Day, with strikes, hartals, and protests. But in Bengal, and Calcutta specifically, the situation went totally out of control. Bengal as a whole was Muslim-majority, but most of the 54% Muslim population of the province lived in areas that would become East Pakistan and subsequently, Bangladesh. The city of Calcutta was 73% Hindu. Muslims were concentrated in North Calcutta and in the Metiabruz area by the Ganga, and were mainly part of the city's underclasses. In the provincial elections of January 1946, the Bengal Provincial Muslim League, a provincial branch of the Muslim League, had emerged victorious, and H S Suhrawardy – a future Prime Minister of Pakistan and an early mentor of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the father of Bangladesh – became prime minister (chief minister) of the province. Almost all members of Suhrawardy's cabinet belonged to the League. In his book, A History of the Bengali-speaking People (2001), historian Nitish Sengupta wrote that Suhrawardy's cabinet without a single upper caste Hindu was a 'strong message to them that the government was determined to rule Bengal without associating with the bhadralok class'. 'For them (upper-caste Bengali Hindus) this was a foretaste of what was likely to happen to them if the whole of Bengal went to Pakistan,' Sengupta wrote. Suhrawardy announced a public holiday in Bengal on August 16. The air in Calcutta was thick with apprehension and foreboding. 'The 16th began as an anxious day for everybody. No one knew what was going to happen. [The Muslim League Leader, Khwaja] Nazimuddin's statement that the Muslims did not swear by non-violence did not lead us to anticipate that active preparations for looting etc. had been going on… No police men were visible anywhere, and even the traffic police had been withdrawn,' the anthropologist Nirmal Kumar Bose wrote to his friend, the writer Krishna Kripalani, in Delhi. (Cited by the historian Ramachandra Guha in a 2014 column in The Telegraph, Calcutta) There were reports of Hindus putting up barricades to stop anticipated Muslim processions, and of Muslim gangs forcing Hindu shopkeepers to down their shutters. 'There was going to be a very big Muslim meeting at the Maidan (a vast open space in central Kolkata) at about 2, and Muslim crowds began to pour in from towards Cossippore [in North Calcutta] about 12. Every one noticed with some anxiety that the processionists carried lathis and brick bats in hand,' Nirmal Bose wrote in the letter cited by Guha. The meeting, attended by an estimated 1,00,000 people, was addressed by Nazimuddin and Suhrawardy. What Suhrawardy told the crowd remains disputed — it is said that he announced he had taken steps to restrain the police, which was understood as an invitation to loot and murder — but his speech was followed by a massive outbreak of violence in the city. Suhrawardy himself 'spent a great deal of time in the Control Room in Lall Bazar [police headquarters], often attended by some of his supporters', Frederick Burrows, Governor of Bengal Presidency, wrote to Viceroy Lord Wavell on August 22. (Cited in Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, 1885-1947 (1983)). His presence at headquarters presumably prevented the police from taking action against the rioters and killers, who ran amok across the city using knives, rods, firebombs, and pistols. Through August 17 and 18, the violence intensified. It was only on August 19 that the military was called in. The chaos and bloodshed continued sporadically, and on August 21, Bengal was put under Viceroy's rule. Bose, the anthropologist quoted by Guha in his column, wrote that he saw 'dozens of corpses lying about,… the air became foul, and vultures for a whole week littered the roofs of Calcutta, and feasted on the corpses until they could do no more'. The American photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White covered the riots for Life magazine, and her pictures of vultures lining the roofs of homes as the rotting bodies of riot victims littered the streets below present some of the most shocking recollections of the violence. For a long time, Calcutta remained divided between Muslim and Hindu zones with very little movement between them. Historians of Bengal believe that the Calcutta riots of 1946 were by far the most cataclysmic event leading to the partition of the province a year later. Much of the street violence during the Great Calcutta Killing was 'a pogrom between two rival armies [of Muslim and Hindu and Sikh] of the Calcutta underworld', Burrows wrote to Wavell in his official note mentioned above. 'Murder', Sarkar wrote in his book, 'was the primary objective…, not – as often in earlier communal outbreaks – desecration of temples or mosques, rape, or attacks on the property of relatively privileged groups belonging to the opposite community'. What is known of Mukherjee and his role in the violence comes primarily from a book on the 'Calcutta underworld' published in 1996, and an audio interview that Mukherjee gave to Andrew Whitehead of the BBC in 1997. According to The Goondas: Towards a Reconstruction of the Calcutta Underworld by Jayanta K Ray and Suranjan Das, Mukherjee was born in 1916 – which would make him 30 years of age in 1946 – and lived in Malanga Lane in the Bowbazar area of central Kolkata. He was '5 feet 4 inches in height, wore long hair like ladies, sported a moustache and long beard', Ray and Das wrote. In his interview to Whitehead, Mukherjee, who spoke in Bangla and said he was 83 years of age, said that on August 16, 1946, he was sitting at his meat shop when he saw a party of Muslim League volunteers marching with sticks in their hands and raising slogans of 'Lad ke lenge Pakistan' (We will fight and snatch Pakistan). Soon afterward, Mukherjee said, there was news that a couple of milkmen had been slaughtered in Beleghata [in North Kolkata]. The news sparked riots between Hindus and Muslims in Mukherjee's area, Bowbazar. He shut his shop and gathered some 'boys' in order to protect the residents of the neighbourhood, Mukherjee told Whitehead. As news of more attacks in the Chandni Chowk area [in Central Kolkata] came in, Mukherjee decided to go there, leaving his boys in charge at College Street. 'There were two houses where a large number of Muslims resided. If the violence spread, there would be massacres, so I went to see what could be done,' Mukherjee said in the interview. He then described scenes of looting and arson, of himself taking on rioters with a sword, and of brickbatting. Mukherjee said that he had told some of his Muslim friends that they had been living as neighbours for years and should not be rioting. But when he failed to stop the violence, he decided to fight back. 'I realised we had to save the country. If the whole area went to Pakistan, there would be more torture and bloodshed,' he told Whitehead. He said that he instructed his boys to retaliate ferociously. 'If you come to know of one murder, you should commit 10 murders, that was my order to my boys,' Mukherjee said. Mukherjee said that he and his boys had used whatever weapons they could lay their hands on – knives, sticks, rods, and guns. They had been stocking up on some weapons over the last few years, he said. 'I had two American pistols. We got some weapons during the 1942 movement. Then during the Second World War, the American army…were in Calcutta. If you gave them Rs 250 or a bottle of whisky, they would give you a pistol and a hundred cartridges. That way we secured all these weapons, and we used them during the troubles,' Whitehead wrote in an account of his conversation with Mukherjee, which was published in The Indian Express at the time. In his interview to Whitehead, Mukherjee did not give a count of the number of people he or 'his boys' had killed during that period. But he claimed that he had ensured that his group attacked only the attackers, and not any ordinary Muslims on the roads. He also gave strict orders to his boys to not misbehave with Muslim women, Mukherjee told Whitehead. Shantanu Mukherjee told The Indian Express that his grandfather 'came from a revolutionary background and was inspired by the life and work of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose. He was part of the Atma Unnati Samiti (Self Development Association) which was one of the revolutionary nationalist groups in Bengal like Anushilan Samiti and Jugantar'. Gopal Mukherjee, Shantanu Mukherjee said, 'attacked only those members of the Muslim League who were spreading violence. He did not attack anyone from their families, women, children or the elderly… Had he not attacked the rioters from the Muslim League, this (Kolkata) would have been Bangladesh. The whole map of India would have been different.' Asked by Whitehead during the interview if he felt proud of his actions in 1946, Gopal Mukherjee said: 'It was not about pride. It was about duty. I believed that I had a duty to help people in distress.' Was there any connection between Mukherjee and the Indian National Movement? A year after the Great Calcutta Killing, Mahatma Gandhi visited Calcutta and appealed to people to surrender their arms. Mukherjee told Whitehead that several of the rioters surrendered their weapons, but he refused to meet Gandhi despite being called twice. He finally allowed himself to be persuaded by some local Congress leaders after he was called for a third time, but he still refused to surrender his weapons to Gandhi. 'I went there. I saw people coming and depositing weapons which were of no use to anyone – out-of-order pistols, that sort of thing,' Whitehead quoted Mukherjee as having told him. 'Then Gandhi's secretary said to me: 'Gopal, why don't you surrender your arms to Gandhiji?' I replied, 'With these arms I saved the women of my area, I saved the people. I will not surrender them.'' Whitehead wrote that Mukherjee had told him that he told the people around Gandhi: 'Where was Gandhiji, I said, during the Great Calcutta Killing? Where was he then? Even if I've used a nail to kill someone, I won't surrender even that nail.' Shantanu Mukherjee said his grandfather had established a revolutionary organisation called Bharatiya Jatiya Bahini, and had participated in the Quit India Movement. 'Due to some difference of opinion he had stopped working for the nationalist cause for a while after the Quit India Movement. His organisation resumed their activities in 1946,' he said. Ray and Das wrote in their book that following the riots of 1946, Mukherjee and his associates were pushed into a life of crime and lawlessness. They received liberal financial help from prosperous Calcutta Hindus during the riots, and were hailed as saviours. After the situation returned to normal, however, they were ostracised and looked at with contempt. 'This probably induced Gopal Mukherjee and his followers to take recourse to organized 'crime' as a means of livelihood. Their involvement with 'lawless acts' now ranged from armed dacoities like the Sonarpur Dacoity case and the Guinea Mansion Dacoity case, to armed hold-ups, house burglaries, smuggling, petty snatching and thefts,' Ray and Das wrote.
The Hindu
an hour ago
- The Hindu
Karnataka Crowd Control Bill referred to House panel after Opposition seeks clarity on commercial, non-commercial events
The Karnataka Crowd Control (Meaning Crowd at Events and Place of Gathering) Bill, 2025, drafted following the stampede at M. Chinnaswamy Stadium on June 4 during RCB victory celebrations and introduced in the Legislative Assembly, was referred to a House committee on Thursday (August 21, 2025). This was after the entire Opposition dubbed the Bill as 'draconian' and argued that it attempted to curtail right to protests and comes in the way of gathering people at festivals and events in temples and fairs. The Bill seeks to hold event organisers responsible for any mishap and ensure that an event in which 7,000 people gather gets police permission. Organisers should apply for permission 10 days before the intended event, it says. It also requires organisers to execute an indemnity bond of ₹1 crore. The Bill prescribes imprisonment of three to seven years and a penalty of up to ₹1 crore or both for those organising events without permission. Offences under the proposed legislation are cognisable, non-bailable and triable by first class judicial magistrate. The exemptions Home Minister G. Parameshwara sought to clarify that family functions or events, such as marriages, mass marriages, religious events, and government events and student protests within the university campus will be exempted from the proposed legilation. However, Leader of the Opposition in the Assembly R. Ashok said the Bill has many sensitive issues and drawbacks. The Bill should clearly divide commercial events such as the one involving RCB and musical nights, and non-commercial events such as festivals or farmers' protests. He was not against imposing fines, imprisonment for lapses with regard to commercial events, he said. However, he said, the Bill should not become 'a weapon' for the police, especially against political parties. V. Sunil Kumar (BJP) said protests are planned overnight and having to apply for permission 10 days prior effectively means that protests will not be held. Umanath Kotian (BJP) asked the government if a temple would be held accountable if 'miscreants deliberately create trouble.' Expelled BJP member Basanagouda Patil Yatnal claimed it was an attempt to target the majority (Hindu) community. HM offers amendments After the Opposition's criticisms, the Home Minister said that the 10-day clause will be reduced to five. There would not be an indemnity bond for religious events, he added. However, as the dissatisfied Opposition pressed for discussion of the Bill in the next legislature session, Mr. Parameshwara referred the Bill to the House committee. The government also referred the Karnataka Land Revenue (Second) Amendment Bill, 2025 — which is related to the Jamma Bane lands in Kodagu district — to the House Committee.
