Daru, Dham cause a stir in Odisha after West Bengal CM Mamata inaugurates Jagannath temple in Digha
Odisha Law Minister Prithiviraj Harichandan on Friday ordered an enquiry into the use of Daru in making the deities and the association of Srimandir servitors in its consecration ceremony.
While the naming of the Digha temple as Jagannath Dham has caused a huge uproar, as the Srimandir in Puri finds place among the four Dhams, the holiest pilgrimage sites for Hindus in the country.
Taking cognisance of the controversy, Harichandan said, "These things, particularly the talks around use of Nabakalebara Daru, are completely unacceptable and have become a matter of great concern for devotees of Lord Jagannath worldwide and the four crore people of Odisha.
"The Shree Jagannath Temple Administration (SJTA) has been directed to initiate an inquiry into all the allegations and anyone found guilty will face action under the provisions of law,' he added.
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Indian Express
7 hours 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.
Time of India
9 hours ago
- Time of India
Take steps to restart SAARC, pursue peace: Farooq Abdullah
National Conference president Farooq Abdullah has called for the revival of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) and urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to pursue peace with Pakistan and help India advance on the global stage. Abdullah, who was speaking on Wednesday at the launch of journalist Shahid Siddiqui's memoir "I, Witness: India from Nehru to Narendra Modi", cited the example of recent meeting between Russia president Vladimir Putin and US president Donald Trump , followed by the latter's subsequent meeting of the European leaders and Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskyy . "Time has come when even our prime minister (Modi) has to take such steps that India can walk with the world for peace... Time has come to restart SAARC. We must take strong steps from our side and find the path to peace -- for the peace of the whole world. The world has become very small, and if we cannot keep this small world with love, then this world will leave us," said the former chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Learn 57+ Languages Easily with AI [Join] Talkpal AI Sign Up Undo Established in 1985, SAARC is a regional intergovernmental organisation and geopolitical union of South Asian countries, including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Maldives, Bhutan, and Afghanistan. Despite the numerous projects and initiatives that emerged from SAARC meetings, tensions between India and Pakistan have periodically negatively impacted regional cooperation and SAARC-related activities. Live Events It has been over a decade since the last SAARC summit was held in November 2014. Though admitting that none of it would be easy, the 87-year-old leader emphasised that only "hard steps can save our nation and shape the world". He added that he would pray to the almighty for the current government to take up this responsibility. Reflecting on the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan and the lasting wounds it inflicted, Abdullah said the division sowed hatred between Hindus and Muslims -- a rift that has continued to harm the nation. "Even today, after so many years of independence, 80% of us still depend on the government to feed us. Look at China - once behind us, today ahead in every field. Why? Because they speak with one voice: one nation, we shall survive together. If you survive, I survive. If you do not, I do not. This tragedy must change," he said. Lastly, Abdullah stated that India as a nation should grow not because of military or economic power, but through the "power of humanity". "That we tell the world - this is not a world of threats. Gandhi is the light that shines upon the whole world," he concluded. Abdullah's address was followed by a discussion on Siddiqui's book, during which the panelists -- senior Congress leader Salman Khurshid, Lok Sabha MP Ravi Shankar Prasad , and Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Singh -- praised the author's commitment to truth and integrity, which they noted have been consistently reflected in his writings all these years. The book, published by Rupa and priced at Rs 795, is available for sale across online and offline stores.
News18
13 hours ago
- News18
AARM writes to Census Commissioner for inclusion of Adivasi faith in census
Agency: PTI Last Updated: Agartala, Aug 21 (PTI) The Adivasi Adhikar Rashtriya Manch (AARM) has written to the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India urging him for inclusion of Adivasi faith in the forthcoming census to be carried out in the country. AARM chairperson Jitendra Chaudhury, in the letter, said that since different Adivasi communities have their own beliefs and practices, it would be appropriate and just to include a column entitled 'Scheduled Tribe/Janajati /Adivasi Faiths" in the census. 'In the Census Digital Library details of Column C-01, the enumeration of population by religious community is described as follows: The figures of six major religious communities viz. Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists and Jains are presented in this table," Chaudhury, who is also the Leader of Opposition in Tripura Assembly stated in the letter on Wednesday. Chaudhury said, 'The combined population of all other religion names grouped in the category of 'Other Religions and Persuasions' (ORP)… has also been included in the table." The Scheduled Tribe/Janajati/Adivasi population was enumerated in Census 2011 as being 8.6 per cent of the population, he said, adding the large majority of the population have their own religious and spiritual beliefs and identities. Chaudhury said numerically this population consists of more than several of the religious communities described as 'major" in the description given above. 'Across India, Adivasi communities have been demanding that their distinct faiths should find a specific mention in the census instead of being lumped in a general category of 'ORP," he said. Chaudhury said in recognition of the legitimacy of this demand, the Jharkhand Assembly unanimously adopted a resolution to request that a separate column for registration of Adivasi beliefs should be included in the census. He submitted that since different Adivasi communities have their own beliefs and practices, it would be appropriate and just to include a column entitled 'Scheduled Tribe/Janajati / Adivasi Faiths". 'In our discussions (on August 19), you had said that the issue will be examined and that the notification has not yet been done. We hope you will do justice to Adivasi communities by including their specific beliefs", he said. PTI PS RG view comments First Published: August 21, 2025, 12:30 IST Disclaimer: Comments reflect users' views, not News18's. Please keep discussions respectful and constructive. Abusive, defamatory, or illegal comments will be removed. News18 may disable any comment at its discretion. By posting, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Loading comments...
