-POONAM MONDOL
Kolkata-based,
23-year-old Sudipto Gupta, an activist of the Students Federation of India
(SFI) and a masters student of political science, lost his life while in police
custody. Sudipto was the state committee
member of SFI. It is difficult to
believe that a student can be killed only for the crime of attending a rally
According to Sudipto’s sister “He was a talented young man. He wrote poems,
songs and slogans for the party.” His father is completely shattered at
the loss of his only son.
On 2 April, after a rally, Sudipto, along with other
members of SFI, was arrested and taken in a bus to the Presidency jail where it
was announced that they were free. The students, however, insisted that they
wanted to be taken to jail and refused to get down from the bus. It was when
the cops were dragging him out of the bus that Sudipto’s head hit a lamppost
and he was severely injured. Many said that even after that the police kept on
beating him and he was not taken to hospital in time. In the hospital too, he
was made to wait for two hours before he could get any treatment.
According to the postmortem report, he had serious
injuries on his forehead, jaw and the back of the head and his eyes had come
out of the socket. He died due to internal hemorrhage.
The next day, his body was taken in rally to the SFI
office, his college and his Garia home. Before that, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee
came to the hospital met his father and said that she will extend every possible help to the
family. But after that, according
to the Left Front Chief Biman Bose, she changed her tune and said that, “It was just an accident and it may happen with
anyone...people travelling in trains hanging at the door get knocked down by poles
and die…” Subsequently, she also allegedly described the death as a “petty
matter.”
There is no
concrete evidence as to what actually happened. Though there are CCTV cameras
on the road that leads to Presidency jail none of them was pointed at the place
where the incident took place.
Though many are
pointing fingers at the police and the state government but it’s still unknown as
to whether his death was a murder or an accident. In the aftermath of the
incident, SFI workers allegedly misbehaved with Mamata Banerjee and the WB finance
minister at Yojana Bhavan in New Delhi
The political tug of war notwithstanding, Sudipto’s
father just wants a judicial probe into the incident so that his dead son can
get justice.
Forward Press.
(Published in Forward Press, May, 2013 Issue)
No comments:
Post a Comment