Initially, it was decided that the team will have five members, but on Friday morning four Lok Sabha members — Dr Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar, Shatabdi Roy, Aparupa Podder and Sajad Ahmed — left for Delhi from Kolkata airport.
They were accompanied by the Trinamool Congress Parliamentary party leader in Lok Sabha Sudip Bandopadhyay, who expressed the apprehension at the Kolkata airport that the party’s fact-finding team might be stopped from reaching the spot of purported communal violence at Jahangirpuri.
“I am not a part of the party’s fact-finding team. I am just accompanying them to oversee the entire development. We were told that leaders of non-BJP political parties are being stopped from reaching Jahangirpuri. We apprehend that the members of our fact-finding team might also be stopped from reaching the spot,” said Bandopadhyay. Thespian-turned politicians and former Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha member of Trinamool Congress also accompanied the team.
Members of the fact-finding team are scheduled to reach Jahangirpuri at around 2 p.m., talk to the local people and soon submit a detailed report on this count to the West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.
This initiative is perceived as a counter to a recent fact-finding team that BJP had sent to West Bengal in connection with the rape of a minor girl, who died later at Hanskhali in Nadia district.
The BJP had also sent another team to West Bengal on the carnage at Bogtui in Birbhum district that killed nine persons on March 21.
BJP’s national president and Lok Sabha member Dilip Ghosh, on Friday, once again ridiculed the Trinamool Congress’s decision of sending a fact- finding team to Jahangirpuri saying that the only mission of the team is to aggravate communal violence and malign the Union government.
