A protest rally organised by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Kolkata\u2019s Esplanade today erupted into clashes with water cannons and tear gas used by police to quell the violence. A working day \u2013 hundreds of people, mostly office-goers \u2013 were inconvenienced due to this. Many got stuck on the way and had to take shelter in shops or office buildings<\/p>\n
The BJP\u2019s protest rally demanding reduction in power tariff had been announced before. The rally headed towards the head office of CESC in Chowringhee had hundreds of BJP workers. They started from the BJP state office on Central Avenue, and were stopped mid-way. The youth wing of the BJP was the main organiser of the rally, led by state BJP secretaries Raju Banerjee and Sayantan Basu.<\/p>\n
As they were stopped, the BJP supporters got into an altercation with the police. They broke the police barricade and started moving ahead. As violence erupted, police had to use water cannon and tear gas shells to disperse the protestors, as pieces of bricks were hurled at the policemen on duty. As the number of bricks hurled at policemen increased, police resorted to lathicharge to disperse the protestors. Many squatted on the road at this point.<\/p>\n
A number of BJP protestors were taken into police custody. The state youth wing of\u00a0the BJP has claimed that police resorted to such extreme measures without any provocation. However, while some BJP workers were injured in police lathicharge, police also suffered injury from bricks thrown at them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Tear gas shells, water cannons, lathicharge in the middle of a busy working day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":279,"featured_media":6482,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_seo_keywords":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-new-bengal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6481","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/279"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6481"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6481\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6482"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}