Oct. 12: A 14-hour blockade in Kishanganj today cut off rail link to north Bengal and the Northeast since 10am, holding up thousands of passengers, including the railway minister who prodded the Bihar chief minister to intervene.
The agitators, who protested a delay in setting up an Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) campus in Kishanganj, put up blockades on the tracks and highways in the Chicken’s Neck, the entry point to Cooch Behar, Jalpaiguri and Darjeeling, the Northeast and Bhutan.
The blockade was lifted around midnight after the intervention of the Prime Minister’s Office, TV channels reported. Sources said Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar had promised that the AMU campus would be set up soon.
Earlier, railway minister Dinesh Trivedi had said: “I requested Nitish Kumar to intervene but he pleaded helplessness. He told me it was a political agitation and he would do nothing to provoke the situation, which is what the agitators want. This is an unfortunate situation. You can’t keep your eyes shut and do nothing. I think it is time for the Bihar governor to intervene. On my part, I am doing everything to protect my passengers and ease their sufferings.”
Trivedi, who had accompanied Mamata Banerjee to north Bengal and was supposed to return to Calcutta by the Darjeeling Mail, had to be put up at a railway guesthouse as the train could not leave New Jalpaiguri (NJP) station even after 11pm. The scheduled departure time is 8pm.
This morning, Trinamul MLA Abdul Karim Chowdhury and Congress MP Deepa Das Munshi had separately visited the spot on NH31 in Kishanganj where the blockade started and expressed solidarity with the protester’s cause. The leaders had said that a varsity campus should come up in Kishanganj.
Around 10.30pm, Islampur MLA Chowdhury, who had served a jail term last year for leading a rail blockade, said Mamata Banerjee had asked him to talk to the agitators so that they lifted the blockades. He said he was on his way to Kishanganj, 30km from Islampur.
After coming to power, Mamata had said several times that blockades would be dealt with a heavy hand.
Today, at least 10 long-distance trains, including the Rajdhani, remained stuck at various points.
The passengers of the New Delhi-bound Rajdhani and the Haldibari-Calcutta Superfast Express ransacked the station master’s office at North Dinajpur’s Aluabari Road after being held up for more than 12 hours.
When the blockade began in Kishanganj, more than 100 cars heading towards Siliguri and the Northeast were stopped. Soon, the protests spread to the tracks.
Several thousand demonstrators blocked the tracks at various points and the highway. Police did not intervene.
Sunil Karmakar, who was heading for Calcutta on the Haldibari Superfast, said: “The train was stopped at 10.30am at Aluabari. In two hours, the train’s water reserve got exhausted. We came to know about the blockade only at 1pm.” In the afternoon, he said he was “searching for food and water” in the neighbourhood.
The passengers of a local train bound for NJP from Balurghat protested in Malda’s Eklakhi station. They ransacked the ticket counter and the station manager’s office after it was announced that the train had been cancelled.
“I was taking my son to North Bengal Medical College and Hospital (in Siliguri). He is suffering from abdominal pain and is wearing an oxygen mask. But after the train reached Eklakhi around 1pm, the railways announced that it would not go any further. Siliguri is 250km from here. I don’t know what to do,” said Bidhan Sarkar’s mother Jyotsna.
Buses that were stranded for several hours took the Bengal-to-Bengal route, bypassing Kishanganj, after 1pm. “I was stuck in Islampur since 9am,” said Habibul Haque, a passenger who had boarded a Siliguri-Malda bus. The drivers had not taken the route earlier because the road is narrow.
Source: http://telegraphindia.com/1111013/jsp/bengal/story_14618435.jsp