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Its officials today asked the Cooch Behar police why the CRPF men had accompanied them during Tuesday’s gherao of the SDO’s office by Forward Bloc supporters at Dinhata, said sources in the Writers’ Buildings.
The Inspector General of the CRPF, Subhash Goswami, maintained that the troops were there only because the state government had requisitioned it. He, however, declined to mention who had issued the requisition.
Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, who returned from Delhi today, discussed the Dinhata firing with top officials.
“The CM wants to know why the CRPF had been deployed to deal with the programme of a political party, which had been declared earlier,” said a senior official in the secretariat.
Later in the evening, Bhattacharjee said he had nothing to say on the Dinhata firing.
The CRPF had been called to Cooch Behar not to help the police maintain law and order during the Bloc’s agitation, but had been requisitioned for the rail roko programme of the Kamtapur People’s Party’s (KPP) Atul Roy faction.
As the police force for maintaining law and order during the Bloc’s programme was inadequate, around 70 CRPF personnel accompanied 90 policemen as reserve force, Goswami told The Indian Express.
“With a rumour making rounds that CRPF jawans had opened fire, I asked my men in Cooch Behar for a report. I am sure that our men did not take part in the firing. We have to follow administration’s orders. If the state government seeks
our help to control a law and order problem, we cannot say no.”
He added that it was the district administration, which should be questioned about its orders.
Cooch Behar District Magistrate Rajesh Sinha said he had no idea that CRPF men had been at the spot.
It is true that for such an arrangement, an official requisition is needed, he said, “but I had never made any such requisition.”
The requisition could have gone to the CRPF from any level of district administration, “but nobody has informed me,” said Sinha.
The Bloc brass, however, reiterated that CRPF had opened fire on a peaceful demonstration at Dinhata on Tuesday.
Bloc state secretary Ashok Ghosh said: “We have definite information that CRPF had opened fire on our supporters from their AK-47 rifles.”
“Our prime question is why CRPF men were deployed to tackle a democratic movement about which the DM had been informed by our local leaders,” he said.
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